Come Sail Away Review – Masterful Maritime Mancala

The fun just keeps coming. The latest entry in the Japanese Game Festival (日本のゲーム祭り) series of reviews is Come Sail Away, from the celebrated design house of Saashi & Saashi. Another board game review, and another lack of board, although it does its best by having each player build a cruise liner from tiles. The aim of the game is to fill the different rooms aboard your liner as efficiently as possible, using one of my favourite mechanisms in all of gaming, the humble mancala. With plenty of tactical space to play in, Come Sail Away is excellent. Come aboard, and let me tell you why.

Each player builds a boat from a batch of square tiles, which represent rooms aboard the ship. Five are the standard cabins, which align with the different colours of passenger meeples in the game. Five more rooms are a mixture of dining room, cinema, and other high-seas amenities. In the middle of them all is a bigger, grand staircase tile. On your turn, you choose one of the two cards in your hand and collect the different meeples shown on it. Then it’s just a case of putting them down, in order, a room at a time. The rooms have got to be adjacent, and you can’t visit the same room twice in a turn, but the order can be forward or backwards.

If you’ve ever played Mancala, or a game that takes inspiration from it, such as A Fistful of Meeples, Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done, or Five Tribes, this might all sound familiar. That’s because it’s essentially the same idea. Move from tile to tile, dropping off one person as you go. The biggest difference between other games like this and Come Sail Away is how you drop them off. The order in which you drop the people off is defined by the card you play.

Stowing your luggage

Along the top of your board, there are a bunch of extra, smaller rooms. Conveniently, they’re the same size as the spaces at the front and back of your boat. There’s also a track where you bump a little suitcase along during the game. If your passenger card has a passenger with a little suitcase icon beneath it, and you manage to place that passenger in a coloured cabin which matches their colour, the suitcase moves along. Anything you cover with the suitcase you get immediately, including those smaller rooms, and things like bonus passengers to place.

What this all results in is a game that’s about efficiency. If you fill a room, the tile gets flipped, giving you more points at the end of the game, but a flipped room becomes a block you can no longer place into, so if you’re not careful, you can end up with a room in a corner that’s hard to reach. The cards have between 2 and 4 passengers on, and it doesn’t take a genius to understand that if you place four people, you can fill rooms quicker, but the snaking routes your placements have to take aren’t always optimal. It’s a really enjoyable puzzle.

When you take all of that and add in the lure of bonus points, it gets very tasty. The first player to fill each non-cabin room (restaurants, etc) gets a 3 VP bonus tile, and when a game is as tight as Come Sail Away can be, every point counts. Once again, though, you run into the issue of making your way around the ship more difficult with every tile you flip. There are only 12 rounds in the game, and they slip by quickly. It’s incredibly moreish.

Final thoughts

If you hadn’t already guessed, I like Come Sail Away. I really like Come Sail Away. There’s so much variance in the game’s setup with the different tiles available, and their placement within the ship’s tableau. Even though you get two cards to pick from for each round, to take new passengers, more often than not you get a feeling of ‘this one is nearly exactly what I need’, and the puzzle-solving that comes along with it is great. If you start getting really tactical, you can even start looking at your clockwise neighbour’s board too, because the card you don’t use goes to them at the end of the round.

I love Takako Takarai’s art style, and Come Sail Away feels like the perfect place to have it. It fits with the whole 20s/30s feel that the game gives me. I can easily imagine Poirot being one of the passengers onboard. The iconography is really clean and easy to decipher, and it pulls through into the rest of the graphic design and illustration too. If you’re not sure what a particular room tile is asking you for, you can infer it from the artwork. Tiles which want four unique colours have four different chairs in the art. Tiles which want two pairs, again, have two pairs of different chairs depicted on them.

It’s a pretty light game, but that’s what you expect from Saashi & Saashi’s designs. They’re games which feel really light and simple at first, but with repeated play, reveal more room to play around with the game’s mechanisms. There’s scope for tactics and strategy, and there’s a small but undeniable level of player interaction with the card you pass to your neighbour. The race to finish off a room is palpable when two or more people have four-person occupancy tiles with three meeples standing on them.

Half an hour’s worth of gorgeous, easy-to-learn mancala fun for any age. Come Sail Away is superb.

How to buy it

Rejoice! Come Sail Away has official distribution overseas. In the UK you can buy it from your favourite FLGS or online store. It’ll set you back just north of £30, and it’s the perfect way to start your journey into Saashi & Saashi’s games. In fact, you can purchase it at my retail partner, Kienda – Buy it now. Remeber to sign up at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for 5% off your first order of £60 or more.

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