When the UK printed the first postage stamp in 1840, few imagined that the idea would soon be adopted worldwide. And few would have guessed that the explosion of stamps that followed the original rather plain Penny Black would give rise to such a huge variety of colours, themes and shapes. And even without the increasingly bright colours and enticing themes, in a pre-Internet age there was a magical appeal in coming across a stamp from an exotic location. Stamp collecting quickly emerged as a popular hobby and there was a time when pretty much every schoolchild had a stamp album in their bedroom.
Paul Salomon's Stamp Swap then is a game about stamp collecting, and, in particular, about assembling a collection to take to and compete with others at a stamp collecting convention. It's the latest title from Stonemaier Games and it's a relatively light, accessible family-friendly game with appealing art from Conner Gillette.
Stamp Swap is played over three rounds, representing the three days of a stamp collectors' convention. In each round, there'll be a display of face-up and face-down stamps plus cards that give extra abilities or scoring opportunities; for example, the opportunity to peek at a face-down stamp. Players take turns drafting these so that they usually end up with six. They can reserve one item but they must then organise whatever else they've drafted into two sets. Players all get to choose one grouping from another player and keep whichever of their groupings others haven't chosen. You place all your stamps out in your album and you choose which of the four additional scoring criteria to benefit from this round.
Players will ultimately be scoring the points values of their stamps (noting that there are some stamps with a negative points value) and they may be scoring for the theme, colour and/or shape of the stamps in their album. In addition, there will be points to be earned for position in your album and adjacency to other similar-shape stamps.
Tho' this is a game with multiple steps, all are reasonably straightforward and logical. There are enough choices to hold the interest of experienced gamers but Stamp Swap is accessible enough to be playable as a 'gateway' game, introducing non-gamers to the drafting and 'I Split You Choose' board game mechanics that may be new to them. The only aspect that new players may find confusing is the extra rule generated at the start of each round by the randomly selected set-up cards. These introduce tweaks to the ordinary rules; fine for those already familiar with the game but a potentially distracting complication for new players. If you find that's a problem, you might try just playing without applying the variable set-up rules for each round until players are all familiar with the game.