trick-taking games

Sail.

Sail was one of the most unusual new games I played in 2023: a cooperative trick-taking game where you’re trying to jointly steer a ship around obstacles and sea monsters to reach the end of the path before you run out of turns or your ship takes too much damage. It’s a retheme of a Japanese game called Hameln Cave, published in a tiny box by the folks at Allplay, who specialize in publishing ‘big’ games in small boxes, including Pollen (a retheme of Reiner Knizia’s Samurai: the Card Game) and the underrated little dice-rolling game Sequioa.

Sail has a deck of cards in three suits where each number has a specific symbol on it, and the combination of symbols on the two cards played in each trick determines what happens on the map. You and your partner will each get a hand of cards, exchanging some before the first turn, and then you’ll play a series of tricks – without communicating with your partner – where you must follow suit if possible, which of course means trying to get rid of a suit and/or find a way to indicate what you have to your partner.

The map varies by game, and you can pick a scenario to suit your desired difficulty level, play through them in sequence as a campaign, or even design your own. Every map has obstacles in rocks and Kraken monsters, plus lines you must cross by the end of the Nth turn to stay in the game. You have a set number of turns to reach the finish line, the distance to which also varies by scenario. One major catch is that the spaces on the map are diamonds, so moving to an adjacent space isn’t the same as moving in a straight line, and you’ll have to try to tack back and forth to keep moving while also trying to avoid the islands and monsters. One great card combination lets you move straight to the diamond that only touches your current space at one point, but as you might imagine it’s hard to pull that off. If moving the ship would put the ship on an island or off the map, it doesn’t move at all, which results in a wasted turn.

The remaining combinations can run from the ‘not too bad’ to the ‘very bad,’ with many of them dealing damage to your ship. Cards numbered 1-3 have a Kraken symbol and when played with other cards numbered 1-3 or cards that just move your ship to an adjacent space, they damage your ship. The game begins with all cards numbered 1 or 2 in a separate Kraken deck, but those will enter the player deck any time you take damage from the Kraken. You might even take two damage if you both play a card numbered 1-3 in the same trick. You can deal damage to the Kraken, which allows you to take the lower card in the trick and discard it to the Kraken deck, improving your deck for the next round and also giving you more time, as you can lose the game when the Kraken deck is exhausted. If you both play cards with cannon symbols, you flip the next card in the deck and get something positive – moving the ship either to an adjacent space or forward, or discarding a low-numbered card to the Kraken deck.

Each round ends when one player wins their fourth trick, so you can extend rounds by trying to balance the number of tricks each player wins. When a round ends, you take damage based on where the Kraken meeple is on its board; this meeple moves up any time you take damage but the top card in the Kraken deck isn’t a numbered card but the Kraken card itself, after which you move that to the bottom of its deck and bump up the Kraken meeple so you take more damage after each round. If you ever take damage from the Kraken but there’s nothing else in its deck, you lose.

If you steer the ship on to the End Token on the map, you win immediately. As in most coop games, there are more ways to lose than to win: If you haven’t reached the End Token after 5 rounds, haven’t passed the checkpoints after rounds 2/4, exhaust the Kraken deck, or move the Kraken meeple to the final space, kindly labeled as “Dead.”

What really, really works about Sail is that it’s extremely tight – I don’t think this is a game you can ever win easily. I played this with my father, an experienced bridge player, and once we got the rhythm going, we did quite well … yet whenever we won a scenario, it was by the skin of our teeth. It made for an intense but fun gaming experience: there’s such satisfaction in pulling off the series of moves you need to win without being able to communicate. After a few rounds, we started to ‘read’ each other a bit more as well, so we could strategize without communicating, which I think is also key to this sort of game (The Mind would be the best-known example, I think).

You can buy it directly from Allplay for $1 cheaper than you’d pay on Amazon, including shipping, and you could check out Sequoia as well. I also just learned that they’re reprinting the Reiner Knizia classic Through the Desert, a top 100 game for me since I started making those lists, but which has gone out of print twice in the last decade or so. I own a copy of a prior printing but I’m excited that folks will be able to buy it later this year.

Claim.

Claim is a 2017 trick-taking game from designer Scott Almes, whose best-known titles are the Tiny Epic series (such as Tiny Epic Galaxies and Tiny Epic Zombies). Claim pits two players against each other in a two-phase game where the first phase allows players to battle to build their hands for the second phase, where the more traditional trick-taking mechanic kicks in, but is altered by the five factions (suits) in the game that have unique powers.

The Claim deck has 52 cards, and you’ll use half the deck in each phase. Each player starts the game with a hand of 13 cards, and in phase one, the top card in the deck is flipped over for the two players to try to win by playing the highest card. The Leader – the start player, or whoever won the last trick – plays first, and the second player usually has to follow suit; the higher card wins. In most cases, the cards used to bid are discarded, the winning player gets the face-up card from the deck, and the losing player gets the top card of the deck as a consolation prize – which, of course, can be better than the card the winning player got.

Phase one continues until the players have used their entire hands, by which point each player has a new deck of 13 cards to form their hands for phase two. Players then proceed to play another round of 13 tricks, this time with the winning player usually taking both cards. At the end of the game, players will count up how many cards they’ve won in each of the five factions; a majority of cards wins that faction, and with five factions you’ll usually have one player winning three or even four to win the game. Ties are broken by whoever has the higher-valued card in the faction.

The big catch is that the factions have different powers that can apply in phase one, phase two, or both. The base game comes with five factions – goblins, knights, dwarves, undead, and doppelgangers. A knight automatically trumps a goblin, regardless of numerical value, although you must still follow suit. You can play any doppelganger without following suit, and it becomes the suit of whatever your opponent played. (If you lead with a doppelganger, that is the suit for that trick.) In phase one, the player who wins the trick gets to keep any undead cards played by the two players and put them in their scoring pile for the end of the game. In phase two, the player who loses the trick gets to take any dwarf cards played in that trick – so, yes, you can lose the trick but still take both cards. (For example, I lead and play a Dwarf card with value 9, the maximum. You follow suit, playing a Dwarf 6. I win the trick … but you get both of the cards.) Only goblins have no special power.

The factions themselves are fun; each one asks you to think a little differently about how to approach it, and the hands you get in each round will require you to come up with different strategies. The one big negative in Claim is that the first round involves so much randomness – your starting hands are random, of course, but the player who loses each trick gets a random card from the top of the deck and can easily end up with the superior card. You could lose all of the tricks in phase one and still get a better hand in phase two. It’s not really a flaw, but a different kind of game, where you know you can play pretty well and still get beaten by the deck.

I picked this up at Origins, and since I bought the game, I got a bonus faction pack as well – ghosts, where you can choose instead to keep the ghost card you played rather than the card you’d normally get during Phase One. You can replace the dwarves, undead, or doppelgangers with ghosts in the original Claim game. There’s a separate, standalone game, Claim 2, with five new factions, and you can mix and match the factions from both games in certain combinations, so there’s fairly high replay value here if you get tired of the base game. It’s a solid filler, nicely portable (the whole game is the deck), quick to play, although I think there are better trick-taking games out there, like Fox in the Forest.

Sail.

Claim.

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