Stalk Exchange

• Designer: Christopher Chan
• Publisher: The Op
• Players: 2-5
• Age: 10+
• Time: 45 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3XTm43m
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Enter a Growing Market!

Welcome to the Community Hedge Fund where players take on the roles of gardeners dedicated to growing flowers and profits. When the market crashes, the Gardener with the most valuable Stalk portfolio wins.

Garden shrewdly to grow your fortune.

•         Plant The Seeds of Investment to Grow Your Portfolio
•         Surround Flowers to Harvest Their Value
•         Trade Your Stalks at The Exchange to keep up with Trends
•         Collaborate With Your Opponents to grow shared investments or outmaneuver them and cause their favorite flowers to wither

To set up the game, place the Garden and Market boards on the table. The Stalk Value tokens are all placed on the 0 space of the Market Track.  Each player gets a Garden Shed (privacy screen) and a reference card.  Each player also draws a starting Portfolio of 8-12 Flower Tokens (# based on player count) as well as a number of Seedy Business tokens (based on starting turn order position). 

The 125 flower tokens are placed into the Greenhouse bag.  Seed the Garden with Flower tokens from the Greenhouse bag on the designated starting spaces and also fill the six Stalk Exchange spaces at the bottom of the Garden board.  The empty Compost bag is placed near the Stalk Exchange as well.

Play is taken in turns (going clockwise around the board) until the game end is triggered.  On a turn, there are two phases in each turn: Action and Upkeep.

In the Action Phase, players take 2 basic actions (and can take extra actions with a Seedy Business Token).  The options are:

•         Plant – choose a Flower token from the Stalk Exchange and place it on any unoccupied space in the Garden (bulb side up)
•         Swap – take a Flower token from the Stalk Exchange and replace it with one from their Portfolio behind their player screen
•         Flush the Exchange – this can only be done with a Seedy Action token, place all the tokens in the Stalk Exchange into the Compost bag, refill it with tokens from the Greenhouse bag.

Then in the Upkeep Phase, do these steps in order:

•         Harvest Flowers – look at each Flower group on the Garden Board, and if the group is entirely surrounded by either the edge of the board or other flowers (i.e. no empty hexes), that group will be harvested.  Look at the entire board as all Harvesting will happen simultaneously – that is, a flower the might be harvested could also be used to surround a different group.  Note that bulbs are never harvested.

•         Bloom Bulbs – any Bulb with at least one empty hexagon adjacent to it will flip over to its flower side.  Due to the timing, you can not harvest a flower on the same turn it was planted because all flowers are planted as bulbs, and harvesting happens before the bulb converts to a flower
•         Update Stalk Values – Take all the Harvested flower tokens and put them on the far end of the Market track, filling in spaces towards the starting end.  For each flower you add to the end of the track, move the corresponding colored Stalk Value token one space forward

•         Move the Stalk Exchange – place the rightmost flower in the Stalk Exchange into the Compost bag. Slide the remaining tokens as far to the right as possible and refill from the left

Continue taking turns until one of the two endgame conditions is met: either the greenhouse bag is empty when you need to draw OR the Harvested flower tokens on the track meet the furthest forward Stalk Value token.  The game will end, and there is a Market Crash – the highest valued flower token loses half of its value rounded up.  If multiple flowers are tied for highest value, they all lose half.

Calculating final scores is fairly easy. All players now reveal the flowers in the portfolio and score points for each based on the final position of the Stalk Value tokens. The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the player with the most flowers of the highest value.

My thoughts on the game

Stalk Exchange is a quick playing market manipulation game.  There is a neat puzzle in planting bulbs into the garden and getting the right flowers to be harvested.  Each time you can harvest a flower, its value should increase.  Of course, at the very same time, you’re trying to collect flowers of that type because you need to have them behind your screen to take advantage of the higher scoring value of that type of flower!

The whole game revolves around your ability to speculate on which flowers will be the most valuable at the end of the game (well, actually, which flower will be the second most valuable).  The game feels churny at first because people are planting things in the garden and swapping out flowers from their Portfolio.   There are 125 tiles in the box, but 52 of these are used in setup in a 4p game, so this only leaves 73 flower tiles in the bag.  While this provides for a decent number of turns, it’s definitely a finite number, and if you want to switch up your Portfolio, you need to do so when you can.  You’ll always have the same number of flowers in your Portfolio, so switching out low scoring flowers is a must.

Early on, it feels like the decisions are not necessarily critical.  I do think that there is still plenty of room to set yourself up, but you should also use these early rounds to see what other people are doing.  It will become important in the endgame.  As the game nears the end, there is a lot of jockeying as people try to get the flowers they want into their Portfolio while others are trying to manipulate the flower Stalk values in order to cause certain colors to bust at the end game.  In most of my games thus far, the identity of the crashing color has pretty much been the kingmaking decision – so it’s definitely worthwhile to get on the right side of the crash…

I do like the challenge of playing bulbs to the right places on the board to trigger later Harvests (or perhaps to block the harvest of certain flowers).  You can definitely try to control the tempo of the game via the speed of scoring OR via wiping of the Stalk exchange… In a 4p game, each wipe shortens the game by 8.2 percent!  The game honestly moves along pretty quickly, and I’d be surprised if our group took more than 30-35 minutes to play this once we get out of the learning game phase.

The rules are really well laid out, and honestly, once you know the game, the back cover of the rules gives you enough to teach the game and refresh your memory.  The only issue I have with the rules is an error in the endgame scoring example.  You will always have the same number of Flowers in your Portfolio, and the example shows uneven numbers (which is clearly a mistake). The art is really nice, and based on the rulebook, it appears that the flowers used in the game were actually created with paper and then photographed/scanned for the game.  I really like this style, and I think it looks quite smart.  It also reminds me of the beautiful flowers from Garden Guests. 

Stalk Exchange is a nicely disguised stock market game, and the added puzzle of the planting/harvesting of the flowers adds a nice added dimension to the process.  The game looks beautiful on the table, but don’t let its pretty exterior fool you; there’s a solid game to be played as well.

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3XTm43m

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale
• Neutral. Steph
• Not for me…