Penny Black

We stopped at Barnes & Noble to see if they had any of the expansions for Dog Park, but they did not.  There did have a new game called Penny Black ... really, a game with a stamp collecting theme in a major retail store.  I grabbed it, not even wondering at the price.  From the box size and weight I figured it would be $35-$40, but it was only $30.

We tried it out on the patio after dinner, and it was different from anything else we have played in the last 100+ blog posts.  There was a mild annoyance at first, since there was a barcode on the box cover that said to click here to watch a video about how to play, but the page had no video.  It wasn't hard to find someone else doing the work for them, but really, if your barcode says X, you need to make sure that it goes to a page with X on it.

The parts are all nice and solid, with a big bag of plastic stamp tiles and four cute albums to put those stamps into.  The stamps fall into four colors/denominations, and three sizes (small, tall, wide).  There are also some black Penny Black tiles: for a two-player game you put six of those in the bag and leave the rest in the box.

The setup for each player is to just pick an album and draw four objective cards: two for the left page of your album and two for the right.  For the first run through, we would recommend just one card for each side -- we ran it that way and it helped to get the feel of the game.  For two players you would use three of the "auction boards", which are thick cardboard squares.  Deal three tiles onto each board (unless you pull a Penny Black, in which case it is the only tile on its board), then like we do in Azul, players take turns choosing all the tiles from one board and adding them to their albums.

The rules spend a lot of words talking about tile placement, but basically, a tile must either fully cover one of the shaded 2x2 spots in the album, or be touching another tile on one side.  Corners don't count as touching.  The smallest tile fills a 2x2 set of squares in the album.  If you cover one of the three stars on each page, you keep that star to be spent on extra actions later on.

That's about it.  Each player tries to fill their own pages.  

The objective cards have a good range of challenges, and the white cards are simpler than the black ones, so you take one of each for each page.  The simplest ones are "get 3 points for each pair of green stamps".  Other included: score points for each page edge with 4 different colored stamps, score points for all four corners of the same color, create a large connected pattern of a single color and score point for how many page edges it touches, score points if you get a group of all three sizes for a color.

Finally, the Penny Black stamp scores 2 points for each tile of a single color surrounding it.  Find the color with the most neighboring tiles and get 2 points for each.  So if there are 5 red tiles around a Penny Black, you get 10 points.  And you can have multiple Penny Blacks.  

You can spend between one and three stars on various actions: move a stamp already on one of your pages (1 star), swap two stamps on auction boards (1 star), grab a tile from the bag and use it right away (2 stars), and buy a Penny Black (3 stars).  If the final score is a tie, the player with the most unspent stars is the winner.

There are a total of ten rounds.  At the end of each round, the tiles remaining on the unpicked board get distributed to the other boards, and new stamp tiles are pulled from the bag to fill the boards back up to three each.  Penny Black stay solo.

The score pad was self-explanatory.  

It was an interesting diversion.  What really stood out to us was that there is almost no interaction between players, which felt really odd.  We're not competitive when we game together, we are 95% curious about how each game works, and maybe 5% interested in conquest.  But having no interaction was weird.  When you swap stamps on the auction boards, it's done before the other player takes their tiles, but that's all. I immediately felt like adding a new action where you spent two stars to steal one stamp from another player's album.  That would a few opportunities to mess with each other each game.

Seeing how there are no interactions, it would make a natural solo game.  Just set up two auction boards, pick your board and the tiles on the other board are discarded.  It would be good practice for the various objectives.

We enjoyed this one.  It was different, and since we both deal with stamps as a side hustle, it was comically on point as a theme for a game. 

2 Nov 2024 update: we played two more games of Penny Black out under the gazebo.  Anne kept saying she didn't really get what was going on, and that did appear to be the case, but she beat me by nine points both times.  This time we found that spending the stars had a lot more nuance than we thought.  We did swap a few tiles before taking a tray, and doing some swaps on our board to meet the objectives.  I still like that idea of spending two stars to steal a tile from an opponent, or maybe to swap it with one of your own -- you could break one of their scoring combos or add to one of your own.

We like this game because of the stamp theme and how different it feels from other games in our collection.  Sure, the Azul family has you taking trays of tiles, but those are just too complex for our casual game time.