Happy Life GamesStamp It! Guide: How to Find the Right Stamping Order Every Time
Stamp It! pins a small picture to the corner of your desk: a house, an ice cream cone, a robot. Below it sits a blank notebook page and a row of rubber stamps, one for each shape in the picture. Every time you press a stamp, its shape prints on top of whatever is already on the paper. Your goal is to copy the picture exactly, and that comes down to one question: in what order?
It's a gentle puzzle with a real logic engine underneath. Once you learn to read overlaps, a jumble of seven or eight shapes breaks down into a short, certain sequence.
How to play
- Study the GOAL card at the top left. That's the picture you're copying.
- Tap a stamp in the tray. It lifts, moves over the notebook and presses its shape in the right place. You don't aim it; you only choose the order.
- Each stamp can be used once. Used stamps fade and show a check mark.
- The counter on the ink pad shows how many stamps you've pressed out of the total. When all of them are down and the page matches the goal, you've won.
There's no timer and no way to lose. If you press a stamp too early, so that it covers a shape that should sit on top of it, the game catches it immediately. The board grays out, the outline of the shape that belongs underneath flashes red, and the message "This goes UNDER!" appears. Then only that last print is lifted off. Everything you stamped before it stays, and the stamp goes back to the tray to use again later.
Mistakes don't cost you anything except the "PERFECT!" finish. A level with no wrong presses ends with "PERFECT!", and one with mistakes ends with "DONE!".
The one rule that solves everything
Look at any spot where two shapes overlap in the goal picture. Whichever color you can see there was stamped later. The one hidden underneath was stamped earlier.
That's all the information the puzzle gives you, and it's enough. Take the first level, a house. The red roof overlaps the top of the blue wall, and in the overlap you see red. So the wall goes first, then the roof. With two shapes that's trivial, but the same reasoning carries all the way up.
Shapes that never touch each other don't care about order. Stamp them whenever you like. Tiny slivers of overlap that you can't really see in the goal also don't count.
Beginner strategy: find the bottom layer
For levels with three to five stamps, work from the bottom up:
- Pick a shape and check every overlap it has. If it's hidden under something at every overlap, and never covers anything, it's a bottom layer.
- Stamp it.
- Now ignore that shape and repeat with what's left. Which remaining shape has nothing still unstamped beneath it?
On level 2, an apple tree, the brown trunk disappears under the green leaves, and the leaves disappear under the red apple. So it's trunk, leaves, apple. Notice that the order in the tray is shuffled, and it's never set up so that reading the stamps left to right gives a correct answer.
Advanced techniques
Work from the top down instead
On busy levels it's often easier to find the last stamp first. Look for a shape that's fully visible, with nothing covering any part of it. That shape goes last. Mentally remove it and look for the next fully visible shape among the rest. Do this until you've worked down to the bottom, then press the stamps in reverse. Many players find the top layer quicker to spot because whole outlines stand out.
Distrust size
The natural instinct when painting is "big things first, details on top." Stamp It! is designed so that instinct breaks. On level 9, the gray chimney goes on before the big blue wall, because the wall covers its bottom. On level 10, the navy visor is a wide band that goes on last, because it wraps over everything. Later levels are chosen so that pressing stamps biggest-first fails somewhere. Let the overlaps decide, not the sizes.
Write the chain down
With six to eight stamps, a quick note helps. For each overlap, jot "A before B" using colors: "brown before green, green before red". Then find a color that never appears on the right side of any note. That's your first stamp. Cross out its notes and repeat. This is the same ordering method used in scheduling and dependency problems, and it never needs a guess.
Watch for the shape that sits in the middle
Some shapes are both over one thing and under another, like level 8's pink frosting, which covers the cherry's lower half but is itself partly hidden by the teal cupcake wrapper. These middle shapes are where most mistakes happen. Make sure everything that belongs underneath is already pressed before you stamp them.
Common mistakes
- Stamping the biggest shape first because it "feels like the background." Check its overlaps before you trust that feeling.
- Looking only at one overlap. A shape can cover one neighbor and be covered by another. Check all of its edges.
- Forgetting small shapes. A tiny cherry or flame tucked under a larger shape is easy to overlook, and it has to go down before the shape covering it.
What changes in later levels
Levels 1 to 10 are hand-made pictures, each built around one idea that's shown on screen with a light bulb: "Roof on top", "Trunk goes under", "Hill in front of the sun", "Waves go on last", "Chimney behind the wall" and so on.
From level 11 the pictures become abstract compositions of rectangles, circles, triangles, diamonds, stars, hexagons and hearts. They start at four stamps and grow to five from level 21, six from level 36 and seven from level 61. Every tenth level adds one more stamp as a peak, up to eight, and the level after a peak is a stamp lighter. On these levels the idea line, such as "Biggest one goes LAST" or "Tiny one hides UNDER", stays hidden until you make a mistake or tap the hint.
FAQ
What does the hint do?
It outlines, in a dashed yellow line, where the next correct stamp will print, and makes that stamp glow and bob in the tray. On later levels it also reveals the level's idea line.
Is there an undo button?
No, but you rarely need one. A wrong press is lifted off automatically, and correct presses can never become wrong later.
Can a level have more than one correct order?
Yes. Shapes that don't overlap can go in any order relative to each other. Any sequence that respects every overlap produces the goal picture.
What's similar?
For more step-by-step deduction, read How to Solve Logic Puzzles. For another picture puzzle with a tidy rule set, try Paper Fold.