Publisher: Spin Master
Designer: Greg Zima
Year: 2010
Players: Two to six players
Ages: 6+
Playing Time: 15 Minutes
Genre: Abstract family game
MSRP: $39.95
Stomple is probably one of the highest production quality abstract family strategy games I’ve seen. Somewhat along the lines of nice backgammon or chess set. It includes glass marbles, a finished black wooden tray, along with the six finished black wooden stompers. Then there is a redwood finished wooden board filled with holes that are lined with a rubber type lining to hold up the marbles until you stomp them. Finally there is a nice black cloth bag to help you mix up your stompers before the game
The game is really easy to set up and learn. The board fits into the tray, so you just invert the whole shebang so that the marbles go into the holes. Then flip the board back over and put it into the tray. Put any stray marbles into their holes and you have a newly randomized board. Each player pulls a stomper out of the bag at random to get their marble color. The marble on the stomper matches seven of the marbles on the board, color-wise. That’s it, you are set to go.
The real object of the game is by earning points by having the last stomper on the board at the end of each round, up to a certain score depending upon the number of players. That’s not how I played it though. We prefer to play a single round, declare a winner, and play another game.
How do you play? On your first turn, you use your stomper to stomp any marble on the outer rim of the board into the tray (so that it disappear). If it is part of a string of same color marbles, you stomp all of the marbles in the string. After you stomp, you leave your stomper on the board in the last hole it stomped.
On each of your remaining turns, you can either stomp any marble adjacent to your stomper (following the string stomping rule as above), or if there are none then you can jump over the board and stomp one of your own colored marbles to allow your stomper to move to a different area on the board.
If at any time, there is no marble next to you to stomp, and none of your marbles left to hop to, you are out.
The actual rules have you scoring three points for winning the round, three points for each bonus marble left on the board (These are the Cat’s Eye Marbles), and one point for each solid marble left on the board.
Again, I found it a lot easier just to say whoever won the round won the game and then just played another game. Using these rules, we were able to teach my four year old daughter how to play, and she could actually win sometimes. You can plan out a strategy for jumping and stomping, or just go with it and have fun without trying to strategize. It’s up to you.
A round takes maybe ten minutes to play, and then you reset the board and play another round. For us each round was a full game, and then we didn’t need to keep score.
You have to develop your strategy each time you play, as the layout of the marbles on the board always changes. Where you start makes a difference, as does plotting to take out the marbles around your opponents stompers. You need to try to leave as many of your marbles on the board as you can, so that you have emergency jumping spots if you need them.
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