| Tap three cards | Claim them if they form a set. |
| Hint | Highlights one card belonging to a set on the board. |
| New game | Shuffle and deal again. |
Set is a pattern game with a surprisingly deep mathematical core. Every card carries four features — colour, shape, count and shading — and each feature has three possible values. Three cards form a set when, for every single feature, they are either all the same or all different.
The rule sounds fiddly and becomes automatic within a few minutes, which is exactly why the game is used in classrooms. The deck of eighty-one cards is a four-dimensional grid, and a set is a line through it, so playing well is quietly training the same reasoning that underlies a lot of mathematics.
Check one feature at a time. Look only at colour across three cards and ask whether they are all same or all different. If they fail, move on immediately rather than checking the rest.
Two cards always determine the third. Given any pair, exactly one card in the whole deck completes a set with them, so once you have two you like, work out what the third must look like and hunt for it.
Shading is the feature people miss. Colour, shape and count are easy to see at a glance, and most rejected sets fail on shading alone, so make it the one you check deliberately.
Do not stare at one region. Sets are made of any three cards on the board regardless of position, and scanning the whole layout beats exhaustively testing the cards in one corner.
For each of the four features — colour, shape, count and shading — the three cards must be either all identical or all different.
A random twelve-card layout has about a one in thirty chance of containing none. Boards here are checked and extended so that never happens.
Eighty-one, one for every combination of the four features.
Very. It is widely used in schools because the rule is simple to state and the reasoning behind it is genuinely mathematical.
No sign-up, no email, no account. Open the page and Set is ready to play straight away, on a phone or a desktop.