How to play
Sixteen packs, sixteen slots, one season. The rules in full, a two-minute read.
Album 38 is a Serie A sticker album game that opens in the browser and starts right away: no sign-up, no app to install, nothing to pay. Every game is an album to fill.
The sixteen packs
Every pack is one Serie A club in one specific year, drawn from between 2004/05 and 2026/27: Juventus 2011/12, Napoli 2019/20, Chievo 2008/09. Inside is that year's real squad, with that year's ratings. You keep one single player and stick him in a slot on the pitch. Then the next pack.
Eleven slots are the starting XI, five are the bench: sixteen packs in all. Bench slots take anyone, and that is what they are for — a pack that brings nothing useful for the XI goes there instead of ruining a position.
The respin
A pack can be refused and drawn again. It is the game's only difficulty lever, and it acts where luck hurts most: with unlimited respins you build the album, without them you are handed one.
Out of position
A centre-back can cover a full-back slot, a holding midfielder can play deep-lying playmaker. But covering is not belonging: a player outside his own roles performs slightly worse, and over thirty-eight matchdays it shows. The full table of costs is on the formations and roles page.
The thirty-eight matchdays
When the album is full the season plays itself. Squad strength is the mean of the eleven, the bench adds a depth bonus, and thirty-eight matchdays later a verdict arrives: from the title to relegation, with 38-0-0 at the top. The league is real: twenty clubs, a table whose arithmetic adds up, scorers, assists. And the thirty-eight matchdays can be read one by one.
Seven ways to play
- Single game — one album, one season, on your own.
- Identikit — six stats and an age, no name: five guesses to work out who it is, and every wrong one opens a clue. Five difficulties, changing one thing only: how good the mystery player can be.
- Local draft — two managers on one screen, identical packs, and at the end the match between the two albums told minute by minute.
- Online tournament — two to eight players with a code, each on their own phone, the same packs for everyone and a knockout bracket.
- Quick tournament — no code: type a team name and land in a public room with strangers, which starts on its own.
- Highest of the six — the stats face down: name the highest one, until you get it wrong.
- Identikit duel — the same mystery player for everyone, private clues, a clock per guess.
The game is free and runs entirely in the browser. The squads are 23 Serie A seasons and 45 clubs; there are no official crests, kits or photographs, and the stickers are drawn here.