In Stapelstad you are a contractor who is going to build a residential area. You try to choose the best plots of land on which to build houses.

The game board consists of a grid of fields with different values ​​from 1 to 5 in a certain color. During a turn you take 2 colored cards from the draw pile and add them to your hand (with a limit of 5 cards in hand) or you discard cards to build a building(s) on a space with the corresponding color of the card, after which you take 1 new card.

When you build a building, you must build it adjacent to an already existing building and discard 1 or more cards of the color corresponding to the space you want to build on. You can play a maximum of 5 cards. For each card you play, you may build 1 building on the field. You then receive a number of points equal to the number of dots on the field, multiplied by the number of buildings you have built. You can build multiple buildings during a turn.