Sometimes there’s a board game with a theme so unexpected, you just have to play, and that’s Stalk Exchange where you play as Community Hedge Fund gardeners growing flowers, and in turn profits. From The OP, designer Christopher Chan, and art by Diana Beltran Herrera, Stalk Exchange is surprisingly really fun and mimics the stock market, without as much of the pain.
Set for 2-5 players, each game takes about 45 minutes since play itself moves quickly. I originally wanted to play the game because I just thought the premise was funny and liked the art, but as my friends and I played through the game a few times, we ended up genuinely enjoying it!
What’s In The Box?
Stalk Exchange comes in a chonky box. The game is played on a garden and market board which are set up next to each other. There are 5 stalk value tokens, one with each of the five flower types (dahlia, daffodil, globemaster, snowdrop, tulip), 125 double-sided flower tokens, a greenhouse and a compost bag, 5 garden sheds, 20 seedy business tokens (shovels), reference cards for each player, and of course a rulebook. There’s also a handy scorepad with double-sided pages.
The pieces for this game are really pretty. I love the floral art and seedy tokens being shovels made me laugh. However, I don’t think the box needed to be big enough to keep the garden sheds assembled. It takes as long to assemble them as it does to take everything out of the box, and the box is just, so much larger than it needs to be.
This aspect might seem like a petty complaint, but I think for folks who don’t have a ton of space (like me!), having boxes be easily storable sizes is important. The box insert is sturdy though and having the bags serve doubly as storage and for gameplay is great because it minimizes the amount of plastic needed.
Unfortunately the greenhouse bag is supposed to hold all the tiles during game play and is not large enough for there to be enough space to really shuffle the tiles. Plus the ones I got, the drawstrings were already starting to fray. It would have worked better to have a much larger bag for the greenhouse and then a smaller bag for the compost, or leave the compost as is.
How’s It Play?
All players start with a certain number of tokens based on number of players which are stored in their shed (serving as privacy screens). Players also get three seedy business tokens to use throughout the game. The garden is seeded with random flower tokens, flower side up and the stalk exchange is populated with six random flower tokens.
Gameplay in Stalk Exchange is divided into two phases for each turn. First in the action phase, players have two actions that they can do, and they get to do two actions each time. You can either plant from the stalk exchange and place it in any unoccupied space in the garden, bulb side up. Or you can swap one of your tokens with one from the stalk exchange. You can never plant from your shed to the garden.
Once the action phase is over, players do the upkeep phase, which has four steps. Not all four steps happen however.
First, you harvest flowers. How this works is that as the game continues, bloomed flowers surrounded on all sides by different flower types, bulbs, or the border of the garden, must be harvested and placed aside for step 3. Step 2 is blooming bulbs.
All bulbs that have at least one empty hexagon space next to them are flipped over. This keeps bulbs being harvested on the same turn that a player has planted, but this means that depending on a player’s strategy they could be seeding (hah) the garden for their benefit.
Step 3 is taking all those harvested flower tokens, and putting them on the Market track, working from the far end to the start of the market. These tokens move up in number as the corresponding number of flowers are harvested.
Finally, step 4 happens every time. Players move the rightmost flower on the exchange into the compost bag, move everything as far right as possible, and then refill the exchange from the greenhouse bag.
Seedy tokens can be used to do an extra plant action, an extra swap action, and once per player per game, flush the exchange by refilling the entire stalk exchange.
The game ends when the last token is placed and crosses with the stalk value tokens or when the greenhouse bag is emptied. However! Just like the real stock market, it’s not just about trying to go hard and make risky trades. When the game ends, there’s a bust! The highest valued flower loses half of its value rounded-up. Once that’s done, players score based on how many tokens they have and the values of the five flowers.
This mechanic both adds an element of strategy to the game so that players need to think ahead and keep track of what’s going on, and is also just hilarious.
The verdict?
Except for some confusion when playing the game the first time, my friends and I really enjoyed Stalk Exchange. The gameplay was deftly designed to keep all the players on equal footing while playing, without making it too easy to lose or win, especially when you can’t bloom bulbs that you’ve planted. You have to focus on what’s happening to the stalk values, your own tokens, and even if you can’t see the others, try to suss out what your competitors are holding onto during play.
If you don’t (can’t) shuffle well, you will realize that most of one flower ended up in people’s sheds and not in the greenhouse bag. On our third run-through this happened with the tulips and we all ultimately just agreed to swap our tulips from the sheds into the stalk exchange to actually get a chance to have some tulips seeded.
The art was also beautiful and except the bags, and my issue with the box size, I loved all the items themselves. Reviewing so many games has really made me start inspecting every aspect of a board game which is great considering I do reviews, and bad because sometimes I feel super nitpicky. But honestly, over all, Stalk Exchange is a definitely get in my book!
You can get a copy of Stalk Exchange on The OP website, or your FLGS for $49.99.
Images and review copy courtesy of The OP
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