Stonk Market 

• Designer: Reiner Knizia
• Publisher: Allplay
• Players: 3-6
• Age: 9+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: 
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Everyone knows that line goes up. Will you be left with the most valuable stocks after a chaotic day of exchanges? Stonk Market is a real-time trading game where you YOLO into company stocks like Blammo or Chatterfly. At the same time, watch out for the ever-shifting Stonk Exchange, which will dictate the stock that’s worth negative points at the end! Will the Glitch & Co stock take you to the moon or will you FOMO into a negative company? This game for wrinkly brains only!

In this realtime game, the deck of 61 cards is shuffled and the one card is dealt face down in the center of the table to start the Stonk Exchange.  The suits have either 5, 7 or 9 cards in them. The rest of the cards are evenly dealt out to the players (this will always work out as there are 60 cards left).  Players are not allowed to look at their cards yet.

When everyone is ready, the dealer flips the Stonk Exchange card over, and then the game immediately starts. Players can pick up their cards and look at them.  The game happens in real time, and there are two options for the players:

1] Make a Deal – players simply announce out loud cards that they have to trade or want to receive.  Other players are free to reply with their own offers.  Once two players agree to a trade, the cards are exchanged faceup.  Any deal is valid so long as the two players agree to it.

2] Trade with the Stonk Exchange – players can put a faceup card in the Exchange and take the card currently there into their hand.  At the end of the round, cards of the same suit as the Stonk Exchange will be worth negative points!

The round is over when a player declares “STONKS”.  They are allowed to do this when they have only majorities in their hand – that is, for each suit in their hand, they have more than half of the cards in that suit.

Each player then calculates their score:

• -1 point per card that matches the Stonk Majority
• +1 point per card you have a majority of that suit (but not the Stonk Exchange suit)
• +2 point per card that you have all cards in that suit
• +5 points for the player who ended the round

My thoughts on the game

To start, let me ask you this question – do you like realtime games?  Did you like Pit as a kid?  If so, this is for you.  If not, well, this is a blissfully short game of chaotic frenzy.   Though I don’t know for sure, this certainly feels like this was Herr Doktor Knizia’s homage to Pit.  However, instead of needing a full cornering of the market, a player only needs to have a majority holding in all of his companies to end the round. Additionally, there is at least the chance to trade a single card with the table in the Stonk Exchange.  Finally, there is no Bear card, but instead, players must try to avoid the suit that ends up in the Stonk Exchange at the end of the round.

So what happens when the trading starts is that there is a frenzied bunch of yelled out requests.  When you’re at a full player count, there’s a lot of things to try to listen to – while you’re also trying to process your own requests/needs, etc.    Everything happens rapid fire and before you know it, someone has yelled out “Stonk!” and the round is over.

For me, the rounds tend to be too short.  As the round can end whenever someone has majorities in all their holdings, it’s actually pretty easy to generate such a hand, especially if a player got a particularly fortuitous initial deal.  Rounds also tend to speed up because of the Stonk Market – while this is a nice way to find a stray stock in a color that you are collecting, usually the discard is also quickly picked up as it’s likely that someone else is also looking for this new color.   As the game penalizes you for having the Stonk Exchange color, you’re also motivated to pick up that share if it matches anything in your hand and then to get rid of any other singleton.

This version of the game does have some ergonomic issues.  Unlike Pit which has common crop names is a nice wide bold font; Stonk Exchange has weirdly named companies in difficult to read fonts, all in not-quite-standard colors.  So, the game forces your brain to make an extra step in processing the trades.  If I ask for BioHippo, then everyone else has to try to read the text at the top of the card to figure out if they have it.  On the other hand, if I ask for puce – half the table is like “WTF is puce?!”  Or if I ask for that purple card, players might think that i’m asking for Socktopus Ltd instead of BioHippo.  Anyways, it just feels like there is one extra hoop that I need to jump through which is super frustrating in a game where speed matters.

That little bit aside, each round is a two minute rush of yelling, trades, and then groans when someone called “Stonk!” way too soon for half the table.  It happens so fast that it’s definitely not uncommon for at least one player to have a zero or negative score each round because they weren’t able to make any majorities at all in the short time.   If it’s any consolation, the three rounds can go by so fast that your brain may not even have enough time to register that it was frustrated before it’s over.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Eric M: I’ve yet to play Stonk Market, but I’ve played the original English edition, Wheedle from 2002, a half-dozen times and enjoyed it, preferring this game over Pit thanks largely to the things Dale seems to dislike: the quickness of the rounds, the singleton card on the table that divides players’ attention in their trading efforts, and the risk of being burned should the round end at the “wrong” time.

Larry:  Like Eric, I played Wheedle quite a few times when it first came out.  I don’t recall any ergonomic issues with the original game, so that aspect may have gotten worse.  But Wheedle was a fun, frantic game, so there’s a good chance I’d like the new version.  (According to the publisher, there are almost no changes in the design.)  As a good friend of ours was fond of saying back then, thumbs up for Wheedle!

Joe Huber (2 plays of Wheedle): Unlike Eric and Larry, I found Wheedle very unpleasant – having a card available on the table led to lots of trading with the center card, as it’s simply more efficient than trading with other players.  I love Pit, but what makes the game fun for me is the chaos of the trading between players, so anything that takes away from that hurts the game for me.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Eric M, Larry
• Neutral. Dale Y, John P
• Not for me… Joe H.