A co-op tricktaker for 2
Sail has been on my radar ever since I first saw it. Partly it's the power of the outstanding cover art, but also the promise of unique gameplay: Navigating treacherous seas and fighting a Kraken with the use of co-operative, no-communication trick-taking! 🤩 And it's only 2p which is quite unique for trick-taking (although more and more of these keep popping up nowadays). Still, we skipped the Kickstarter, as shipping and taxes would have cost more than the game itself, but picked it up at SPIEL23 from @allplayhq . 💪
Turns consist of a single trick, then checking if something happens. Trick-taking follows standard rules: the first player plays a card, then the other has to play one with the same color. Bigger value wins, or if they didn't have a same colored card, then the original color wins as it's the trump. Whoever wins is important: it could mean the direction of movement in case you move the ship, but you also track wins of both players. A round is over if someone has won 4 times, so you want both players to be balanced in this regard, as the end of a round is a bad thing.
👌 After a trick you check the icons of both cards. If it's a matching pair, the appropriate action is triggered. (Basically either a moving or shooting the cannons). If there is no match, nothing happens, which is something you want to avoid.
☝️ The most important is moving. You have to reach the goal by the end of the 4th round, and there are storm tokens that you have to pass in time as well. Movement is made harder by islands which completely block you, and tentacles which damage you.
However movement isn't everything. Everytime you take damage or the round ends, you will put cards from the Kraken deck to the discard, and if the Kraken card is ever the only one in the deck, you lose. ☠️ So you want to keep attacking back, to add cards to the Kraken deck.
💭 All of these things make coordination with your partner essential, but if you remember from the first paragraph: no communication is allowed! 🙃 So you really want to predict what the other wants to do and try to deduce and remember what cards they might hold, or else you might just swim with the fishes. 🫢
