Everybody likes an underdog, especially if it looks this pretty! Stamp Swap by Stonemeier Games hasn’t been out for long but it’s BGG rating has already dropped to a 7.2 and most reviews I’ve seen are somewhere in the “it’s not for me” (also known as the “I got this as a review copy and don’t want to talk negatively about it”) to lukewarm range. Truth be told, when I demoed it at SPIEL Essen 2024, I was very much in the same camp. Sure, it looked drop dead gorgeous but I-cut-you-choose isn’t the most exciting mechanism to begin with, the spatial puzzle wasn’t particularly tight, and the whole thing was over rather quickly. Everyone at my table left somewhat disappointed, and that was the end of the story.
In my mind, I had written Stamp Swap off already after that experience, but one thing made me curious: that logo of the Automa Factory that hinted at there being a solo mode included. How the heck does one do a solo mode for an I-cut-you-choose game?!?
Setup
Setup of Stamp Swap is rather quick. Unfold the small main board which mainly acts as a turn tracker, victory point track, scoring summary, and place to put five scoring cards, one from each category. These come from a stack of options, so there are slightly different scoring conditions each game. One is about scoring the color of stamps in a particular way, one their theme, size, scoring so called canceled stamps (without a point value printed on them) and special blue end game scoring card will score some spatial relation like 10VP per edge on the personal player board a player has filled without a gap. The rest is shuffling a few cards, handing out player boards and getting a whole bunch of stamp cardboard tiles shuffled and ready to go. That’s it.
The Turn
The whole game only lasts three rounds, split into three phases: first, players draft their daily batch of stamps, then reserve only a single one for themselves and split the rest into two piles. The starting player then chooses one pile from another player, takes it, and the other player takes the remaining pile and adds it to their personal reserve. That player then also continues to choose a pile from another player and so on. Finally, each player places their stamps into the grid on their player board and then chooses which one of the four main scoring cards to use for that round. Since there are only three rounds in the game and none can be scored twice, there will always be one a player won’t be able to score at all. The real issue though is the other way round: how to collect stamps so each scoring really brings in points and doesn’t just fizzle out with a meekly 4-5 VP.
To give players a little bit of direction, each player board (well, more like thick paper than actual cardboard) has one category of stamps such as “animals” or “space” printed in the top right corner. Each stamp of that category collected produced 1VP per round for that player, which isn’t earth shattering in a game that can easily score in the 120-150 VP range but still helps.
A few additional aspects have been added to spice up the simple core mechanism: there are stamps that provide straight VP (even negative) at the end of the game and canceled stamps that don’t. There are special “rare” stamps done in gold foiling that don’t belong to any of the regular colours/themes but have a high end game point value. There are tiny “forever stamps” the can both be used to fill gaps on the player board when needed for the spatial puzzle scoring card at the end of the game but also score majorities at the end of the game. There is the start player token that actually becomes part of the initial draft in each round and there are special ability power cards.
Overall though, the core challenge is how to draft tiles that are attractive to another player as well as those attractive for oneself and then split them so that hopefully a player will pick the right pile and one can keep what has more value from oneself. Since each player only gets two piles (one of another player they pick and one that remains after someone has picked from them), the player actually has to be careful to draw stuff they need themself. E.g. if there are three space stamps and they are all picked by different players, there is no chance to get more than one of them in that round.
One thing to mention here to set the right expectations: the spatial puzzle aspect should be seen as only one of five scoring criteria, similar to collecting stamps of the same colour or theme. While the plan can get full if one really goes for large piles, I never had it that I wasn’t able to fit everything on my board. Instead, the puzzling is only relevant for the end game scoring of that blue scoring card. Examples are 5VP for every 1×1 gap created or 3VP for every stamp that is completed surrounded by other stamps. Stamp Swap is not like a Fit to Print or Horseless Carriage where making everything fit just right is the core challenge of the game.
The other element that will give you a good idea of what type of game this is is the event deck. To be precise, there is a deck of cards that randomly determines what number of stamps of what size are placed on offer each round by drawing one card per player involved. For the final card drawn, the card text gets activated and that adds a modification for that round like not being able to reserve any tile at all before cutting or adding more items. So this is no super deep strategy game but a rather light, slightly chaotic “let’s see what you make out of this mess” type of game.
Game End
The game ends after the third round of drafting, cutting, choosing, and intermittent scoring. So unless players are taking a long time to draft or choose, this is a rather quick game. You can crank out a 2p game in under 30min easy for example.
Solo Mode
So the big one: how the heck does a solo mode for an I-cut-you-choose game play? Surprisingly well. The drafting phase is completely replaced and instead both the automa and the human player get a random collection of items, again done via card draws with accompanying special effect for the round.
The automa uses a rating system to assign tokens to each item, draws a “decision card” to remove 0-4 tokens from the more valuable of your piles, and then picks the one with more tokens remaining. So the more attractive one makes one of the piles, the higher the chance the automa will pick it, but it’s usually not a certainty.
In a similar fashion, the automa assigns values to its two piles (already pre-assigned on the card that is drawn) and then swaps pieces between them if the difference of value between both piles is too large. That’s pretty much it. Instead of strategically collecting certain types of stamps and then choosing an intermediate scoring, it just draws a card from a special 4-card deck that determines which scoring it chooses for that round and how many points it gets (without actually respecting the actual scoring criteria). Similarly the end game scoring is done by drawing another of those “decision cards” and that assigns VP to each of the boxes the automa stores its gathered items in (e.g. 10VP for every tile that matches the size criteria on the yellow scoring card and has a 2 or 3 printed on it). It basically scores everything somehow, favouring stamp shapes that match the yellow scoring card of the that play sessions, favouring the rare gold-foiled stamps, and trying to stay competitive in regards to forever stamp majority.
Of course it’s a lot of randomness and not the same as playing against a human player that you know will be highly interested in a specific theme or color of stamps. But it does a very good job in giving the player a somewhat similar feel. It sometimes is lucky in picking the pile that contained that face-down rare stamp it couldn’t have known about or sometimes picks exactly the pile you didn’t want it to. There are also three levels of difficulty which basically just ramp up the scoring multipliers and how well the automa does in any given game seems to fluctuate a lot. But overall, the automa does a surprisingly good job!
Usability Issues
What comes as quite the surprise is that there are a number of usability issues with a game that has this nice of a production. For example, the stamp art looks absolutely gorgeous. However, everyone I played it with had trouble distinguishing a given stamp’s theme at some point. It’s not represented by the color (because that is a separate criteria) but by how the background is shaded: full background is space, thin horizontal lines that are hardly visible at a distance are animals while blank backgrounds are monuments and squiggly lines are flowers. As you can see in the photo of the player aid below, even the slight blurriness of the lens makes distinguishing animals and flowers by their background alone impossible. Color is less of a problem because the border has different patterns for those of us that have reduced color perception.
But that’s not all: the gold foiling looks nice but in the wrong light makes it next to impossible to see the point value of the stamp, the cards used to produce the initial offering indicate a larger longer stamp in a way that it can easily be mistaken for two smaller ones, the automa cards don’t have any indication on the back of them which are the decision cards and which are the ones used to create the stamp offering, the insert is done in a way that one can’t really leave the stamps in there during play (because some will topple over and reveal their front side), etc. As good as Stamp Swap looks, unfortunately this seems to be a case of form over function, which is a bit of a shame. There isn’t anything game breaking, but it just leaves a bad aftertaste on an otherwise very pleasant game.
Conclusion
Over the years, I’ve played quite a number of Stonemeier games, from Wingspan to Red Rising, from Tapestry to Viticulture, and for some reason or the other, they never quite matched my taste … which is curios to me because I respect what Stonemeier Games as a publisher and in particular Jamie Stegmaier as an individual do for the hobby very much. I really should give Viticulture World a try at some point, I have a suspicion that might be a game for me, but I digress. So it’s funny to me that the first game from Stonemeier I really enjoy playing is one that most people on BGG will dismiss in an instant. And that got me thinking: maybe it’s just a matter of framing it right.
Let’s ignore the usability issues for a moment: despite being a gorgeous production in a “big” (=Ticket to Tide) box, this game has an asking price of just ~35€. Sure, there is a lot of air in there and the player boards aren’t actually boards, but still, very nice production with even some foiling. It can be played with up to five players but also solo and is over quite quickly. So an apt comparison is not a full size 90min game but rather something like a Furnace, a filler or pallet cleanser before jumping into the next heavy 2-3h game. Or something you get out to play with someone that never plays board games, e.g. when visiting the family over Christmas. Imagine for a moment Stamp Swap would come – for the same price – in a box half its size. Would you be as disappointed that it’s only three rounds and there is not that much strategy involved in it? Probably not. It’s an I-cut-you-choose, you kind of know what you are getting into from the beginning.
Despite adding additional elements, the core premise of Stamp Swap is a rather simple one. Draft stuff so you can create piles in a way to end up with what you need. And for a number of those add-ons, one can ask the question do they help or not. E.g. does it really need the round events that mess up the core formula? Does it need the specialist cards that grant one special powers if the whole game is only three turns long? Forever-stamp majorities? Heck, in some sense the question can be posed if it needed the spatial puzzling part at all. If I had a wish list for Stamp Swap, it would mostly consist of a) having an option to double the play length (maybe an official variant?) and b) distilling the game more down to its essence while creating more interesting challenges. As is, as a multiplayer experience, it too much just leaves players wanting for more … or at least the players I usually play with. It has to be acknowledge that I’m not really the target audience for this game. Maybe doubling the number of rounds would already fix a lot because the specialist cards and theme-collecting would have more of an impact.
As a solo experience though, things click way more for me. I can get through a game in 20min, making it a nice little care-free game to play after a long day at work when I’m not in the mood for something meatier. Sure, a big part of what the automa does is basically randomness and beat a predefined scoring goal (that is just split up depending on the used scoring cards). You’re also missing the drafting part. But since it’s just 20min, I don’t mind that the game is only three rounds and there is not much opportunity for long-term strategising. I look at all the beautiful stamps that are out, get a little bit excited if one of my face-down stamps is a golden rare stamp the automa doesn’t “know” it. I get slightly annoyed if the automa didn’t go for the pile I so expertly crafted for it and I manage to much more satisfyingly max out my spatial puzzling board (though I tend to lose if I go for that). You can also mostly ignore the specialist cards and don’t have to worry about becoming starting player. And of course you don’t have the downtimes of having to wait for another player to draft or decide how to cut. In its reduction, the solo mode for me creates the better playing experience, making me wonder if the multiplayer could have been tweaked in a similar direction as well.
To sum it up: Stamp Swap undeniably looks gorgeous but sadly comes with usability issues that leave a bad aftertaste (but don’t break the game). As a game, it will be too light for any of my regular readers and even if you are up for buying a light game, it doesn’t have that addictive quality of a Tranquility, Tokio Highway, or Fantasy Realms most players are looking for in a light game. As a “turn your brain off and enjoy a tea” solo game, I’m pleasantly surprised with it and that is what keeps it around for me right now. Do I absolutely have to have it in my collection? No. But it has managed to stick around longer than a lot of other games, and that says something as well. So maybe give it a try, perhaps you’ll be pleasantly surprised as well. Just go in it with the right expectations.