Timeline of stamp
Below is the timeline of stamp. This will get updated over time.
March 2018
An economics teacher told his students to redesign Monopoly as a final project. While most students just made minor design changes to Monopoly, the creator decided to create a board game from scratch.
First, the board was drawn with pencil, then colored in. The game's goal was to involve more skill than luck, so multiple playtest scenarios had to be mapped out on each move... Finally the board game you see above was created.
Read below, the original theme on Google Docs (from June 2018):
So you all know about the board game Monopoly by now. It being a capitalistic game, Monopoly “successfully” paints a picture of a competitive financial world, in fact so competitive that players must bleed money from their own FRIENDS with nothing for them in return; a lack of player cooperation makes the game less fun. In addition, Monopoly does not portray an accurate housing market or economy— lacking principles such as mortgages, supply and demand. Most importantly, Monopoly does not capture our human dependency on money. That is why money buys happiness in our version of “monopoly.” Welcoming Happy Cash.
Happy Cash is a fast-paced board game that is educational by simulating real world economics, and a human desire of acquiring currency.
July 2018 - June 2020
Yep. The game was called Happy Cash at first. And Happy Cash sat on the shelf of a school, collecting dust. Then I went to university. It was hard to make friends because no one was interested about finance. One day, I was sitting on the bus on my way to work, and I was eavesdropping a couple talk about their friend:
"What's she doing now?"
"Oh she's going into finance."
"That's so boring."
Yep. Without saying another word, the first reaction to finance was that it's boring. But why is it boring? Is it complicated? Is it because our parents or school didn't teach us it?
I thought this is a problem. Then I realized something: I always got people to talk about money. Either the people I hung out with were naturally interested in money, or I was just a finance magnet. Either way, I thought there was a way to make finance simple and exciting enough that everyone would love it.
Then I realized, wait a second... there's a board game in my Google Docs. I created a decent board game two years ago! Thankfully I still had the original photo of the board game, saved in my Snapchat Memories.
However the photo was not clear enough (it was shot from an iPhone 5)... so I tried to recreate Happy Cash. I had to reach out to see if my teacher still had it...
July 2020
Unfortunately, the board game was lost. So I went to Staples to buy a similar blue colored poster. I tried to recreate Happy Cash. Here's how that turned out:
Yep... I didn't complete it. Turns out, copying and pasting everything from a previous photo was a pretty mundane task. But there are a few things in this photo that were changed, from two years ago:
1. I added small colored dots. This meant that players can only go to that space once, and they needed a marker in order to show that.
2. An extra row was added to the game, which made the map bigger, but it also made the game longer and complicated.
So I worked on this until my brother recommended me to move the design process online.
August 2020
Right off the bat, Stamp game went through a lot iterations. We collected feedback every-time a major design was changed. (By the way, if you have any problems or suggestions for the game, submit them here).
Our first playtest was done with my brother, on September 3. It was a 25 minute game. And this is what the design looked like at first:
One month later, another playtest was held but with friends. It was the first time we got to play with 4 players.