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When I was a young tyke, I used to collect stamps. I know, right? Who would have known? I used to love arranging them into books, getting weird anniversary collections from Royal Mailand all sorts. Fast forward 30-odd years and while I have not participated in philately for a while, I have recently been sent a stamp-based board game by Stonemaier Games. Grab some stamps…… let’s stamp swap!
Gameplay
Stamp Swap is a game about, well, stamps. Making nice collections of them, swapping them and laying them out following varying scoring conditions. Some of them are square, some are rectangular, some have animals on and some are even foiled. It's all very chilled and mainly trouble-free.
The Setup
The setup for Stamp Swap is fairly trivial. Give each player a board, two wooden markers and three ticket tokens. You set up the main board, select a few scoring cards for the three days you will be collecting and showing your stamp collections over. Shuffle all the different kinds of stamps, the event cards and the attendee cards and your ready for the races.
The Collect Phase
At the start of each of the game's three rounds, you will flip over a number of event cards equal to the number of players. These cards will not only indicate what stamps players will be drafting from but also have a quirky little event to make each round different.
Once all the stamps from the event cards have been laid out, players will draft from them one at a time until they have 6 items each. I say items because stamps are not the only thing that gets drafted, the first player token and sometimes even attendee cards can also be up for grabs. Attendee cards are a mixture of special powers for whoever drafts them or even extra scoring for your stamp collections. Juicy!
In this phase you will be drafting not only the highest value stamps but also drafting stamps that work fro the games many scoring conditions and the end-game final show. You can only clai one scoring opportunity per round though so planning a bit in advance will also serve you well.
The Swap Phase
In this phase players must split their six items gained in the previous round for a ‘I Split You Choose’ sort of shindig. You are allowed to reserve one thing from your six, apart from the rare ‘foiled’ stamps and the other five must be split into two piles with each pile having at least one
item in.
Your goal here, as with all these types of games is to make one pile just attractive enough so whoever picks it, will leave you with the pile you really want. Or I suppose you could make them both equally viable for you can cover all your bases. Up to you really.
After the split the players go round picking a pile from another player, the player who was picked from gets their other pile back, then picks a pile from another player, until everyone has 6 items again.
The Show Phase
In this phase, players arrange their swapped stamps on grid-based boards. Usual placement rules apply no overlapping, everything the right way up and all that jazz. You then place all your exhibitor cards in your tableau of sorts and proceed to intermediary scoring. At the end of each round, you place one of your ticket tokens on a scoring criteria and score it accordingly.
These scoring criteria, which were randomly chosen at the start, are your run-of-the-mill stamp-based tasks: groups of the same shape, similar themes, and colour stuff. There is nothing new here. A bit of thinking is required here though. You can only score one per round and keeping one eye on the future, for both scoring and drafting purposes, will serve you well.
End of the Game and the Final Show
After three rounds, three drafts, swaps and shows we proceed to the Final Show. Here we have another scoring card, which was not available to be selected previously, which is then scored. This one you were working all game for, so you better have been working towards it, it normally scores quite high. On top of that, you add all the scores from your stamps, your exhibitor cards and lastly score for whoever has the most ‘forever’ stamps. These are small 1x1 stamps that players can draft throughout the game.
Whoever has the most points wins, is the best stamp swapper and we can all discuss why we let Barry have so many rare stamps! Damn you Barry!
Components
Once again Stonemaier has knocked it out of the park here. The Stamps are beautiful especially the foil ones. The rulebook is lovely, the insert is lovely and everything has a certain charm to it. I have no issues with the components whatsoever, it's all quaint and well-designed.
Final Thoughts
I first played Stamp Swap at two players and found it OK at best. However, since then I have played it at higher player counts and enjoyed it more. It's by no means my favourite game but there is some enjoyment to be had here in the drafting, splitting and multiple, selectable scoring criteria. This is amplified at higher player counts and the game is much better at the upper ends of the playable player counts.
If you are in the market for a chilled, tile placement game with a bit of ‘I split, you choose’ then this could be the game for you. I will be keeping it in the meantime, it has a few more plays in it yet I feel. (Plus I find the stamps delightful)
