Come Sail Away!

Come Sail Away! is a puzzle game for 1-4 players where you are each loading a cruise ship with passengers. Your success depends on how well you can satisfy these picky customers, who want to be placed in suitable locations.

Each player sets up their own ship in front of them: while there are numerous ways to do this, the rulebook has a simple version for your first couple of plays (described here) . The important thing is that all cruise ships are identical, save for some additional cabins assigned randomly at the top. The rest of your ship is made up of cabins, dining rooms and salons, all constructed around a grand staircase.

Play takes place over twelve rounds: in each, you’ll have two passenger cards to choose from with between 2-4 passengers on it. The passengers come in five colours, and the colours are important: green passengers want to be in green cabins, red in red and so on. Dining rooms demand two couples and salons four different-coloured passengers: one supposes that with a cocktail in their hand perhaps they overcome their inhibitions.

How these passengers are placed, though, is the heart of Come Sail Away. If you’ve ever played mancala it will be familiar: after choosing a card, you must start in one room of the ship dropping off one passenger, and then work your way either clockwise or anti-clockwise, dropping off a single passenger in each subsequent room (also, you must follow the colours as shown on the card, either left-to-right or right-to-left). Thus, you may find yourself with a passenger who doesn’t want to go in the room you’d like to deposit them in: if this happens, you must instead place them to one side on your Disgruntled Passengers tile: each one is minus a point at the end of the game. Each card also has a passenger with luggage on it – if this passenger is delivered to their matching cabin, you’ll move a luggage marker up a track, triggering all manner of passenger-based bonuses: extra passengers, even extra cabins.

What will help you navigate this puzzle is the grand staircase: it’s considered adjacent to every room but the four corners, so you can visit it once per turn, dropping a passenger there: they don’t score any points, but they don’t lose you any either. Caveats: your grand staircase can take up to three colours maximum, and you can never double back on any turn.

As soon as any room is full you’ll flip it over, returning all passengers to the supply. That room is now points at the end of the game (many also prompt more luggage bonuses too) but in the short term it becomes inaccessible to passengers, meaning whenever you would drop one there they become disgruntled instead. You know what they’re like.

After 12 rounds the game is over and everyone counts up the values of their flipped-over rooms, points for the luggage track and a point for any passenger still on the ship (in incomplete rooms). Deduct a point for each disgruntled passenger, and most points wins!