Trading Postage by Istaera
You've just picked up a new hobby: stamp collecting. And like all stamp collectors, you want your stamps to be arranged carefully in your albums. Rearrange your stamps on the page and visit shops and swap-meets to trade stamp pages, until you can join the Elite Stamp-collectors Cabal.
Each stamp has: - a colour - a picture - a postage value (the number in the top left-hand corner) - a quality (poor, common, pristine).
Click on a stamp to pick it up, and click where you want it to be to put it down and pick up another stamp. You can improve your stamp pages by: - using better quality stamps - matching stamp colour in a row or column - making sequences of numbers in a row or column (e.g. 2,4,6) - arranging the pictures in various ways (e.g. kangaroo and emu want to face each other, birds want to be on top of trees). Play the game to discover the combinations.
Once you have a well-arranged stamp page, trade it for another page of similar worth. Hopefully the page you trade for will have better quality stamps in a worse arrangement, so you can re-arrange for an even more worthy page. There are various locations that you can trade in; click one of the buttons on the right to visit a location, for a small travel fee. Each time you enter a location, the inventory of that place will be refreshed.
Ratings
| Overall | 85th | 4⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 58th | 4⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 79th | 3.9⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 48th | 4.302⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 418th | 3.605⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 278th | 3.463⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 340th | 3.128⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 236th | 3.791⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 50🗳️ | 68🗨️ |
At first it was a bit unclear how to play, but then when I realized, the game became really interesting.
I love the idea, it's a good balance between puzzle and scoring.
I forgot some rules about color matching, rows, prices but with some more tutorialization this game would be perfect!
What I wasn't a fan of: The mechanics were maybe a bit too complicated, and at times I felt a little lost, especially at the beginning, but obviously that didn't stop me from figuring it out (mostly). By the end, when I was just clicking around, I (re-)discovered the tray and the fact that I can upgrade it - I never used it, just stored the stamps in my books.
Also I feel like drag and drop would suit this more, but that's a tiny little thing.
Overall, had lots of fun!
I loved it! Would absolutely play a full version of it. After some initial confusion, I got into it big time.
That said you also really deserve the five star rating for theme - as the collector aspect is integrated into setting AND mechanics.
I think i played this for up to 20 minutes and didn't get totally annoyed by the music which is also always a plus. The choice of having something "classicy" als further fits the setting and mood.
Also i think this could make for a great board game if you want to go in that direction. I can easily see my boardgame friends enjoying it and there are so many options for stamps and even more mechanics in a game for multiple players (stealing stamps, auctioning etc). If you ever try in that direction leave a post here!