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. Every year, with its squads, is in the season pages. 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.
The card duel
With an account the stickers do more than fill the album: they become a deck. Sixteen of them, eleven in a formation and five on the bench, with the same positions as the draft — only a keeper in goal, and no keepers on the bench. Every player has three decks, one per maximum average: 75, 80 or 85, and the average overall of the sixteen cannot go above it. Out of position, the cost comes off all six stats.
Two to four can play. You pick the average and wait for an opponent with the same one; if nobody shows up there is the bot (one, two or three of them), and friends can be challenged with an invite or a four-letter code, up to four at the table. The game opens with the opening card: a random stat, a random card from each deck, and the higher number chooses who starts. Then the keepers' duel, where the goalkeepers play the first point on their own.
From there, five cards in hand. Each round a stat is drawn; whoever leads lays a card face down, of which the others see only the name, and the others answer one at a time. All flip: the highest stat takes the point, and a tie at the top scores nothing. With two, first to eight wins; with three, six; with four, five; twenty seconds per move. Not even the browser sees the opponents' cards: hands and decks live on the server, and each player gets only what is on the table.
Ten ways to play
- Single game — one album, one season, on your own.
- Career — with an account: the same squad from one season to the next, ageing, with a transfer window in between and a target that climbs every year, from survival to the title. Lose the board's trust and you are sacked.
- 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.
- Auction tournament — squads are built at auction instead of from packs: two hundred coins each, the same cards for everyone with the rating hidden, then the bracket.
- 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.
- Card duel — your sixteen-card deck, built from the stickers in your album, against everyone else's, two to four players: one face-down card per round, first to eight with two.
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.