Last night some friends introduced me to Set, a card game designed in 1974 that I had not heard of until 2023. It fucking sucks.
Set is a broken, bad, and frankly cruel game if you, like me, are the least visually inclined person on the planet. If your brain processes imagery with all the elegance of an engine a raccoon climbed into and died inside of, Set will lay your limitations bare. If your spatial reasoning is that of somebody who can get lost in a hallway with a single door, Set will effectively hand those you care about a diary labeled “Most Embarrassing Secrets DO NOT OPEN.”
Here’s how it works: I don’t fucking know. Ostensibly cards are laid out in front of all players in rows, and they vary in four ways, with three possibilities for each: number of shapes (1-3), shape (diamond, oval, squiggle/cheeto), shading (solid, striped, nothing), and color (red, green, purple). Three cards form a set when they all have one characteristic in common and everything else is different. So, to steal an example from Wikipedia, because my brain remains locked in a duel to the death with this game that it will surely lose: "3 solid red diamonds, 2 solid green squiggles, and 1 solid purple oval form a set, because the shadings of the three cards are all the same, while the numbers, the colors, and the shapes among the three cards are all different." The game is not turn-based. If you see a set, you call it asap – before anybody else can.
For those I was playing with, the process quickly became intuitive: They scanned each row of cards on the table and, when something caught their eye, instantaneously called out “set!” and pointed to three corresponding cards. It was as though their brains – I don’t know – evolved to seek out patterns, unlike mine, which evolved to both freeze up and yell at me, at the same time. I performed best when everybody was at a loss, giving me more time to acclimate to the card landscape, but even then my dear old friend Intrusive Thoughts would creep in, generating so much nervous static that it was difficult to get into a flow with the game. If I saw a set, I often second guessed myself. After all, was it really a set if somebody else hadn’t seen it already?
My friends started talking about how Set is a fun way to learn about how your brain operates. One mostly fixated on number patterns. Another was more colors oriented. A third seemed to be some kind of Set savant, able to perceive limitless dimensions like Doctor Strange. I could muster no such back patting for my flesh mech’s little meat patty pilot. Mine was akin to Shinji from Neon Genesis Evangelion: paralyzed in key moments, probably because it didn’t get enough approval from its dad.
I’m sure Set is a perfectly decent party game if you’re somebody with no anxiety or intrusive thoughts and a baseline functional ability to perceive the world around you. That’s just not me, apparently! So fuck Set, a game made to torture me and people like me. If a family member tries to break it out during a holiday gathering this year, flee (down whichever path requires you to recognize the fewest patterns).
