Allplay has brought back a minor Reiner Knizia game from 2002, originally called Wheedle, but now with the very how-do-you-do-fellow-kids name Stonk Market, complete with the meme guy on the cover of the tiny box. It’s a very silly, fast-moving game that works really well at its higher player counts because it becomes a chaotic shoutfest – which I happen to think is great – even though there isn’t exactly a lot of game in here. It’s available on Allplay and is showing up as a pre-order on Miniature Market.
In Stonk Market, the deck has 61 cards showing nine different colors/suits that represent different companies. At the start of each round, you deal the entire deck to all players, with one card left in the middle. The companies are numbered 5, 7, or 9, showing how many cards in total there are from that company in the deck, so you need 3, 4, or 5 cards, respectively, to get a majority. (The companies have names and their own imagery, all pretty silly, although they don’t matter for game play and I can never remember them.)
Your goal in a round is to get a majority of the cards for any company where you have at least one in your hand; if you get a majority, you score one point per card, but otherwise your cards aren’t worth anything. You get those majorities by frantic trading, either by swapping a card from your hand with the one card on the table, or by making trades with other players. It’s much faster to trade with the table, of course, but that’s limited to one card at a time, whereas in trades you can give or receive any quantity.
The round ends when someone has only majorities in their hand and yells “Stonks!” to stop play. Then you score: 1 point per card if you have a majority of that company, 2 points per card if you have all cards of that company, -1 point per card you have that matches the card still on the table, and 5 points if you were the person who yelled “Stonks!” – unless you were wrong, in which case you get 0 points for the round. You play two more rounds and total your scores from all three rounds to determine the winner.
A number of gamers have compared this to Pit, the 1903 commodities-trading game that is one of the few games of that era to survive and remain somewhat popular today. They’re similar in that you’re shouting with other players to make trades, but I think that’s as far as it goes. Pit insists that you get a monopoly in one commodity, and you make trades by shouting the number of cards you’re trading but not the commodity. Stonk Market is inherently going to be faster because all players are saying what they need, there’s always a trade on the table, and you only need to get majorities rather than monopolies. I can’t say if that’s better than Pit – I have never actually played the older game, I just know the rules – but it’s not really the same.
Stonk Market plays 3 to 6, but it really needs the higher player counts to be more fun – there’s more madness on the table and more people shouting for trades. With three, the market isn’t fluid enough, although with six it can be faster for someone to get to “stonks!” You can also play this with just about any age, as long as they can understand the concept of getting a majority of those three numbers (5, 7, 9). It’s another tiny-box game in the $9 line from Allplay, so it’s a pretty low bar to clear for me to recommend it – there are a few I don’t like, but this one’s a keeper. It’s a B- for me.