Postcards arrive from a chain of pen pals, one in every country of the world. Each card goes to the next country, and its pen pal writes the next card.
① Tear it out. Trace the dotted line around the stamp, slowly. Rushing builds up strain and at full strain the stamp tears; drawing across the stamp cuts into it. The closer you stay to the line, the cleaner the cut.
② Peel it. Drag from the glowing corner toward the middle, a short gentle stroke at a time, then the next corner. Pulling the wrong way strains it too. Old stamps are more fragile.
Every card picks a minigame for step ②: 🤏 peel the corners, ♨️ steam it (hold to heat, stay in the green zone), 🎯 wiggle it loose (tap in the zone, it speeds up) or 🪶 tickle it off (rub back and forth fast).
Too many tears and quality goes below zero. At 8 tears the stamp falls apart completely: a philatelic catastrophe, filed in your album forever.
⚡ Quick rip skips all that: one yank with the success chance shown on the button. Old, rare, glued-hard or already torn stamps have worse odds. Success gives a rushed but whole stamp; failure tears it.
Cards can come with gimmicks: 🍯 extra sticky, 💧 wet (peels easily), 💨 windy (gusts tug at it), 🏖️ sandy (scratchy), 🌟 shiny (a special!). And sometimes something lives under the stamp.
The stamp comes from the card's country, and its release year is real. Its id is the country code and that year, like GB-1840.
The seal (postmark) comes from a random country, in a year between the stamp's release and 2026.
Quality (out of 100):
Condition: no tears 35, one tear 24, two 13, more 4
Cut: up to 10 for a clean tear-out
Luck: up to 20, the closer the seal is to the stamp's center
Specials: up to 35 for remarkable seals: 🏠 home seal (same country as the stamp) +15, 📅 first day (sealed in the release year) +10, 💯 century +8, 🎯 bullseye, 🪃 boomerang, 🗓️ today, 👑 legendary +5, 🎉 jubilee +4, and more. Some of them combine into something crazy.
The album keeps the best copy of every stamp. Sort it by origin, by year, by seal quality or by specials. Stamps you don't have yet are just ?.
🥚 Secrets found: 0 / 0 · the beach is full of them