Terracards

Terra Cards is a unique rogue-like deck building game that combines the usual features of the card genre with farming. Cards appear as living things, with one card being a cute cow, and another being sunflowers. Placing cards adds to your farm but come at a cost. Cards need to be read carefully before being placed, as there is no undo button once placed.

Adorable Graphics

The most immediate thing you notice upon playing Terra Cards is that the graphics are adorable. They look very similar to the bright, simple graphics of Stardew Valley, a similar and equally pleasant game to play.

The peaceful music and sound effects blend seamlessly into the graphics display, making the whole game a warm and peaceful experience.

Nerd Mode Improves Gameplay

The menu offers players an option called ‘Nerd Mode’ which has to be checked before it will work. When on, Nerd Mode shows players how much a card is producing, and what the cost is. An example of this is a wheat block might show a 3 for producing 3 wheats, and a 1 showing the cost of a water. This helps players know if they need to put more wells down to keep up with water, and how much money they can expect to get from their little farms. It’s a very useful feature but may not be obvious to players when they first start playing.

Some players do not like this option because it can crowd the screen with lots of little numbers, but overall, it’s a helpful feature to at least know about.

Easy to Learn, Hard to Master

Understanding how the game works takes just a few minutes. Terra Cards starts you off with a random selection of cards, which you must use to start your farm with. After that, it’s a delicate balance of not going under financially while continuing to grow your farm.

This can be tricky if you get a bad hand of cards, or if you expand too quickly, causing you to run out of money. Luckily, the game allows you to roll over the cards every once in a while, making the game a bit easier to manage.

The goal of the game is to earn a certain amount of gold within a few days of playing the game. This is more challenging than it seems, because you need to spend quite a bit of gold to be able to make gold. It may take several attempts before you get the idea of how to play.

While this game doesn’t have quite the replay value as Stardew Valley or other similar farming games, it’s worth playing on its own. It has a lot of charm to it, and will keep most peaceful farmers busy figuring out how to make a farm run with the hand dealt to them.

Pros:

• Cute graphics
• Virtually endless replay value

Cons:

• Can be difficult to grasp at first

Terracards is a charming idle tycoon game that puts you in charge of rebuilding your grandfather's farm, which has been reduced to a lone island in the middle of the sea. With a deck of cards representing different elements of your farm, you must pay off debt and turn the land into a thriving farm empire. What seems daunting at first soon becomes an addictive loop of strategic choices and number crunching.

The core gameplay revolves around playing cards each turn that represent crops, animals, structures, and upgrades for your farm. The key is choosing a balance of production cards to generate sellable goods, alongside improvements to maximize efficiency.

It feels very much like a hybrid between a city builder and an incremental clicker game. The cutesy pixel art style is reminiscent of Stardew Valley, while the expanding production chains have shades of Minecraft mod packs like Sky Factory.

Farming For Profit

Once you get your basic crop and animal production loops spinning, the real strategy comes from chaining together inputs and outputs to increase revenue. For example, wheat combined with a windmill produces flour, which can then be turned into bread in a bakery.

Finding these synergies between cards is crucial to ramping up your earnings each turn. The game does a great job of slowly introducing new elements so it never feels too overwhelming.

Investment and Progression Loop

Choosing what cards and upgrades to invest your hard-earned profits into is central to success. New crops, machines, and animals are costly but essential to increasing output. This leads to tough, engaging decisions as the cards you're offered and station upgrades vary each playthrough. Unlocking new recipes and technologies feels great and enables even greater efficiency.

One major downside Terracards has at the moment is its lack of a proper save system. Since the game is still in early access, I have no doubt a save feature will be implemented in the feature. However, as it is now, all you can do is see how far you can make it before you have to start over from the beginning next time you play.

Still, the incremental nature of the game makes it so it's never boring to see the many ways you can find to grow your farm. It's similar to that dopamine rush you get from games like Vampire Survivors – only with more farming and fewer hordes of enemies on screen.

Relaxing and Strategic Gameplay

The core loop of choosing cards, producing goods, and selling for profit is inherently enjoyable and relaxing. Yet the strategy required to maximize profits introduces lots of meaningful decisions as well. It strikes a perfect balance, keeping you engaged in the short and long term without inducing stress.

It's easy to lose hours tweaking your farm, pursuing the ever-larger numbers the game dangles as incentives to optimize further and pay down your grandfather's debt.

Terracards avoids the pitfalls of many idle games by providing a strong early and late game thanks to the ever-increasing strategic card combinations available as you expand. I wish there was even more end-game content to pursue with high-level farms, but what's there should keep farmers busy for a long time.

Pros

• Addictive gameplay
• Cute visual style and upbeat music
• Relaxing yet strategic loop

Cons

• Can feel repetitive in the late game
• Few end-game goals to pursue