Stamp Swap Is About as Fun as Collecting Stamps

By Keith Law | October 31, 2024 | 12:00pm

Tabletop Reviews board games

Stamp Swap Is About as Fun as Collecting Stamps

Listen to this article

“I cut, you choose” isn’t quite as grisly as it sounds: It’s a game mechanic where one player divides something they have—cards, tiles, goods—into two sets, however they want, and an opponent gets to pick one to take. Figuring out how to split your items into piles so that you can coax someone else into taking one of them, leaving you with the stuff you really want, becomes a huge part of the strategy. It’s a big part of Hanamikoji, one of my favorite two-player games, as well as some other very highly-regarded games like It’s a Wonderful Kingdom, The Great Split, and The Castles of Mad King Ludwig.

Stamp Swap, a new game from the designer of Honey Buzz and Genotype, is also built around this mechanic, where the goods are stamps of varying values, colors, themes, and sizes. You’re a philatelist at a three-day convention, trying to create the most valuable stamp collection over the course of three rounds, and you and your opponents will draft and then swap stamp tiles and attendee cards in each round to build out those collections.

Each game of Stamp Swap starts with five random objective cards across different categories—color, theme, shape, cancellation status, and ‘finale’ cards for the final scoring. In each round, you’ll draw cards from the event deck to determine what stamps and attendee cards to add to the pool, with some stamps face-down and others face-up, and then go around the table to draft them until each player has six items. (There’s an exception around the first-player token, which, if unclaimed, goes to the last drafting player, who then has a seventh item.) Each player reserves one of their six items, as long as it’s not a valuable ‘rare’ stamp, and then divides their remaining five into two piles, doing so in any way they wish. Players then go around the table, starting with whoever has the first player token at this point, selecting one pile from any opposing player and taking it for themselves. Once you’ve lost a pile in this way, you keep your second one—you can’t lose both. In a three- or four-player game, it’s possible for one player to end up keeping both of their own piles.

Most Popular

Stamp Swap

After the swap phase, each player simultaneously places all of their new stamps on their board, orienting them face-up with the value or cancellation mark in the upper right, and then scores one of the four objective cards on the board plus points for their Exhibitor cards (one of which is preprinted on each player board). Each player starts the game with three tickets and will use one in each round to choose an objective card to score. You can’t score the same card twice in a game, and the finale card scores for everyone. After the third round, you do a regular scoring, then do the final scoring, counting points from that finale card, adding up the values of all of the stamps on your board (canceled stamps are worth zero, and some stamps have negative value), two points for each Specialist card you have, and then score your one-square ‘forever’ stamps based on who has the most, second-most, and third-most, with a ghost player considered to have three of these stamps in a two-player game.

The game works well as is, but I don’t think it brings anything new or is especially fun to play, unfortunately. I don’t love I-cut-you-choose games in general, and here I think the game would work just as well if everyone just drafted the tiles/cards in some fashion—a snake draft, or an altered draft order where each piece you take alters the draft order (like in Patchwork). Most of the objective cards are straightforward, but some are fiddlier to calculate because the game uses two different definitions of “group” when referring to stamps on your board; I had similar trouble with some of the rules around Specialist cards that let you take a random stamp, as you can activate those cards when they’re in your piles before the swap phase completes, which is pretty counterintuitive. Even the philately theme has been done before—Penny Black came out in 2023 from Buffalo Games, and it has a lot of similar mechanics but is easier and faster to play.

As in all Stonemaier games, there’s a well-designed solo mode using an algorithmic player called an Automa, with a deck of cards to tell you what to have the opponent do. The Automa in Stamp Swap is high-maintenance, so while I think it provides real competition—I played it once and beat it by just two points—I thought it was more trouble than it was worth given the light nature of the game itself. For a more complex game like Stonemaier’s Wingspan or Tapestry, the extra work is more justifiable.

Now that I’ve told you all the things I didn’t love about Stamp Swap, I’m going to turn around and say the game is actually fine—it is balanced, it isn’t hard to learn, and it absolutely plays in under an hour (the box says 20-60 minutes). You could easily play without the Specialist cards, or hand-pick certain Objective cards that are easier to understand. You could even ditch the swap and go to a draft instead, although then you’d have to call it Stamp Draft and that’s a totally different game. The artwork on the stamps is fantastic, the text is all very readable, and the box comes with a lidded plastic tray that holds all of the stamps, sorted by size. There’s a lot to recommend here. Maybe I’m just more of a numismatist at heart.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.