Set Card Game: Rules for How to Play

Setup

Choose a player to be the dealer. They will shuffle all of the cards together. For a simpler game you could choose to just use the cards where all of the symbols are filled in.
The dealer lays twelve cards face up on the table so all of the players can see them. The cards don’t have to be laid out in a specific way, but they shouldn’t cover each other up.

Setting up the card — Twelve cards have been placed on the table. The players will now try to find three cards that belong to a set.

How to Play Set

In Set there are no turns. All of the players play at the same time. As soon as the dealer places twelve cards on the table, the round begins. All of the players will look at the cards on the table trying to find a set. For details on what a set is, see the Finding a Set section below.

When a player thinks they have found a set, they call out “set”. The game temporarily pauses as the players check to make sure if the player did in fact find a set. The player then has a couple of seconds to point out the set to the other players.

If the player did find a set, they will take the three cards that make up a set and places them in front of themselves. The dealer reveals three new cards from the deck to replace the cards that were taken.

Finding a Set — One of the players pointed out this Set. They correctly found a Set since each card shows a different symbol, each is a different color, each card only has one symbol, and the three cards use different shading. The player that pointed out these cards gets to take them.

If the player did not find a set or they take too long to point it out, they lose a point. The cards that the player thought were part of the set remain on the table.

Failing to find a set — The player that pointed out these cards did not find a set. The cards do have different symbols, they all only have one symbol, and they all have different shading. Two of the cards are purple though. All of the cards either had to be purple, or one of the purple cards had to be red. Since this is not a set, the player that pointed it out loses one point.

Sometimes the players won’t be able to find a set among the cards on the table. If all of the players agree that a set can’t be found among the cards in the middle of the table, the dealer places three new cards on the table. There should be fifteen cards on the table. When a player finds and removes a set (reducing the number of cards to twelve), the dealer does not put out new cards.

Finding a Set

Each card in Set has four different features to it. These features are key to creating sets.

Symbol: A card can either have ovals, squiggles, or diamonds.
Color: The symbols on the cards can either be red, green or purple.
Number: Each card can either have one, two or three symbols on it.
Shading: The symbols on a card can either be filled in, outlined, or striped.

The goal of Set is to create “sets”. Sets are a group of three cards where all of the features on the cards are the same between all three cards, or the features are different between all three cards. Lets look at a couple examples for what constitutes a set.

An example of a set — This is a set because all of the cards have the oval shape, they are all green, they all have a different number of symbols, and they all have different shading.

Example of a set — These three cards are a set because they all have different shapes, the colors are different, the number of shapes are the same, and the shading is different.

Three matching cards — For this group of cards the shape, color, and number of shapes are the same. They all have different shading.

Example of three matching cards — These three cards differ in all four ways. They all have different shapes, colors, number of shapes, and shading.

End of Round

Eventually the last cards from the draw pile will be placed on the table. All of the players will keep trying to find sets on the table. When the players are no longer able to find any new sets, the round ends.

Each player counts up the number of sets they collected during the round. You will score one point for each set you found during the round. Instead of counting sets, you can add up all of the cards you collected and divide your total by three to get your score for the round. Write down your score on a piece of paper making sure you subtract a point for each penalty you committed during the round (called for a set and couldn’t find one).

Scoring in Set — This player found seven sets in the round. They will score seven points unless they received penalties.

The player to the left of the dealer becomes the dealer for the next round. The dealer shuffles all of the cards and places twelve new cards on the table.

Winning the Game

The game ends after each player has played as the dealer in a round. All of the players count up their points scored in all of the rounds. The player that scored the most points wins the game.

In newer versions of the game the instructions also say you can choose to just play one round. Whichever player scores the most points in the round, wins the game.

Solo Game

If you want to play Set with just one player, the rules mostly stay the same. You obviously aren’t competing against the other players to try and find the sets the quickest. Instead you are trying to keep finding sets. If you should not be able to find a set with twelve cards on the table, you will incur a penalty. You will then put out three new cards.

At the end of the game you have to find sets when only twelve cards remain. Each set you find among the last twelve cards removes one of your penalties. If you have no penalties at the end of the game, you win. If you still have one or more penalties, you lose the game.

Components

81 Cards (one card of each combination of shape, color, number and shading)
Instructions

Year: 1988 | Publisher: Play Monster, Set Enterprises | Designer: Marsha J. Falco | Artist: John Langdon, Franz Vohwinkel

Genres: Card, Family, Pattern Recognition

Ages: 6+ | Number of Players: 1+ | Length of Game: 30 minutes

Difficulty: Light | Strategy: Light | Luck: Moderate

For more board and card game rules/how to plays, check out our complete alphabetical list of card and board game rules posts.

Written By:

Eric Mortensen

Eric Mortensen is an owner and head writer on Geeky Hobbies since 2014. He is an avid board game player and collector with over 3,000 board and card games in his collection. Since 2014 he has written more than 1,100 board game how to play guides.