And in addition, the company website (www.versalentertainment.com) said, "While we don’t make strictly educational games, we do have a special interest in games you can learn something from. For example, our card game Set Sail! teaches a little bit about life aboard ship during the Age of Sail." Who can say anything bad about a little incidental learning while you play?
Set Sail! consists of four decks of 32 cards (one for each player)(which meant that our five player group from above was one too many; if your "whole family" is bigger than four, the rules say you can buy another copy of the game and mark the backs of the cards to differentiate them from the first pack), each of which has an identical set of cards, but with a different emblem on the backs to allow you to separate the cards back into individual decks between hands. The cards come in a regular tuck box, with a single page of pretty simple rules. The cards are good physical quality, although the pen & ink artwork is a bit on the rough side.
Each card has a number from 1 to 8, with four of each number in each of the decks. Each of those four cards of each number comes in a different colour (i.e., each deck has a blue, brown, green, and yellow 1, a blue, brown, green, and yellow 2, etc.) but the colours don’t come into play in the standard game. Each player holds his deck face down in one hand and then turns over the top card. If the card is a 1, the player automatically plays it in the middle of the table as the beginning of a new stack. If it’s any other number, he either plays it on an existing stack (and there can be as many as 16 stacks of varying heights) if the top card in that stack is one less than the card in his hand (i.e., if he has a 3 in his hand, the player can put it on any stack in which the top card is currently a 2) or he places it face up on his discard pile. The player continues turning cards over from his deck as above, but can interrupt that procedure at any time to take the top card from his discard pile and play it on a stack as if the card had just come from his hand. The player who plays an 8 card on a stack completes it and moves it out of the playing area.
The only restrictions on play are that a player can never have more than one card in his playing hand, and he can only have one discard pile; if he flips over a card from his deck that’s of no use right now and then realizes that the top card in his discard pile can be played on a stack, he can’t put aside the card in his hand in order to pick up the one from the discard pile; he has to either wait for the card in his hand to become playable or put it on the top of his discard pile.
Players don’t take turns; they flip and play cards as quickly as they see opportunities, so frequently in the time it takes for one player to realize that the top card in his discard pile can now be played (as a result of someone putting the appropriate lower-number card on a stack) and then grab that card and move to slap it onto the stack another player who’s a fraction of a second faster can beat him to that opening, forcing him to put the discard card back on the pile and wait for another opportunity to come up.
There’s not a lot in the way of strategy involved in Set Sail! Once you’ve come up with the optimum position for your hands and your discard pile so that you can move as efficiently as possible, that’s about it. The game really is fast-paced, so the only strategic decision that comes up is when you draw a card that’s not playable now (say, a 5 when the stacks in play have 1s, 2s, 3s, 6s, or 7s on top; i.e., anything but the 4 you need in order to play a 5) and you have to decide whether to discard it or to hold onto it for just a few seconds in hopes that someone else will play the card you need to set you up to play the one in your hand, but if you’re likely to have to wait more than two or three seconds for the card you need to be played (e.g., if you have a 5 and all the available stacks have 1s, and you’d need to wait for someone to play a 2, then a 3, then a 4 before your 5 became playable) it’s best to just discard and continue flipping over new cards at breakneck speed.
When you run out of cards in your deck, you grab your discards, flip them face down (but don’t waste time shuffling) and use that as your new deck. The first person to play all 32 cards from his deck and his discard pile wins, gaining 1 point for each card his opponents still have in their possession. Because a hand goes so fast, the rules recommend you play either a set number of hands or that you play until you reach a set goal: the rules suggest 40 points as the goal, which can be achieved if a player wins two or three hands, but with four players that might end up requiring eight or more hands, which still wouldn’t be a very time-consuming prospect if it weren’t for the fact that you have to return all the cards to their original owners to set up for the next hand, a process that seemed to take longer than actually playing a hand. The card backs are all the same colour, a dark purple that makes the black emblems hard to see. Plus two of the emblems (compass rose and ship’s wheel) are similar enough in appearance that you have to consciously look at them while separating; the sextants and anchors are dissimilar enough that you can differentiate them at a glance. A lighter background colour would have helped, but giving the four decks different background colours (which couldn’t be all that much more expensive, since the fronts had four different colours) would have made sorting as fast-paced as actual play.
The scoring gives no bonus for completing stacks, and the rules don’t say that the player who caps a stack with an 8 has to take the stack, he just has to remove it from the playing area. Since scrabbling the stack together can take time (they get messy when players are slapping cards down as fast as they can, especially since players sitting on different sides of a table are likely going to put cards down with different orientations), it saves time to just shove a completed stack out of the way in whatever direction is most convenient; if they end up on the floor, not a problem.
You may have noticed that nowhere in my description of play did I mention anything about the Age of Sail. That’s one of the game’s biggest drawbacks: the sailing motif has as much bearing on actual game play as the picture on the back of a standard deck of playing cards does.
Along with being numbered 1 through 8, each of the cards is also labelled with a stage of building and outfitting a ship for exploration: 1 is the construction of the Hull, 2 is laying in of Provisions, 3 is hiring a Crew, and so on up to 8 which is the ship’s national Colours. Unfortunately, the stages of construction aren’t in logical order (5 Cargo shouldn’t come before 6 Captain, especially if hiring the Crew was 3). In fact after we’d played I quizzed the other players and none of them could remember any of the cards except for 1 and 8, because the 1 cards start the sequences and the 8 cards end them; everything in between was just a blur of numbers, with no incidental learning happening at all. The game could just as easily have been called Body Building, featuring eight pictures of successively more muscular men and women, or of body parts starting from the foot and moving up to the head; Pizza, featuring eight pictures of a pizza getting smaller as slices are taken away; or even just Build 8, with the numbers 1-8 and no illustrations whatsoever.
And when you play an 8 on a stack, you’re supposed to yell "Set sail!" as you move the stack out of the playing area. Add to that two optional rules that introduce two other terms with nautical feeling to them, although the games themselves are no more nautical in flavour than the standard game (if you play with the Drydock variant, alongside your discard pile you can start building a stack in reverse numerical order, starting with an 8, but this stack is reserved for your own cards, not a stack for all players to use like those in the playing area; and in the Nationality variant you can only build stacks of cards that are all the same colour) and the anchors, sextants, etc. on the card backs and you have the total of the Age of Sail experience one gets from Set Sail!
Even discounting the nautical disappointment of Set Sail!, the game had some promise. A bit of modification with permanent markers, putting easy-to-see colour coding on the card backs to make deck separation faster would go a long distance to improve the game’s basic play value (although the existing black-and-purple colour scheme reduces the palette you have available to make modifications). And the introduction of a variant set of rules that reward strategic play of cards (e.g., granting you more points for a stack in which most of the cards are of one colour or are from your own deck, either of which might make players try to keep track of who played what where, or at least which stacks they themselves have played cards on) could make the game something more than just "the fastest card-flipper wins," would add to its long-term play value.
But as it is, Set Sail! could as easily be played with multiple plain playing card decks (playing from ace up to king, instead of 1-8, or even separating out cards to make smaller 1-8 decks if you’d prefer), and so long as the decks had different backs, play would be faster (and therefore more fun) than with an official Set Sail! deck.
