Gentlemen,

your contributions provided some interesting insights:

1) There seems to be no defined standard in the community on the matter.
2) Practical reasons seem in favor of the "one bag per type" approach, because it will be difficult to tell different sets apart to keep them separate
3) Common practice - in accordance with the rules - is to immediately return any used damage counters to their respective bags upon surrender of a ship.

As a bottomline, I conclude that a "common sense" approach exists as the current standard.


I had asked, because putting counters of different sets into one bag would allow for slightly different outcomes. Theoretically, provided you have enough sets of damage counters, it would be possible to draw, say, 20 broken masts in a row. This would not be possible, if sets are kept separate. But I assume that there is no 'hardcore' tournament scene for SoG, in which some pettifogger could take exception to such (IMHO meaningless) subtleties.

The difficulty of keeping sets of damage counters separate is a real one - unless undue effort to prevent this would be taken.

Just to record the knowledge somewhere, it seems sensible to make a list of the number of counters per type or to make scans of the counter sheets before punching them - maybe to post the results here for the community. This would allow to recreate "full sets" in the event of any type of mixup occurred, say in Trafalgar-type conventions.

I may be forgiven to (time and again) refer to ASL as a comparison: There, the issues of mixing counters while unsing sets of separate players is to have one player use counters for side A, the other for side B. For "systems-counters" (i.e. administration/management), only those of one player are used. Thus, it is easy to separate them after the game. However, in ASL there are hardly any multi-player situations and very rarely more than two "sides". Opposed to that, SoG uses "systems-counters" only, and the chance for multi-player situations and/or players bringing their individual sets of counters for a given scenario is higher. As such, the initial situation is different.

I may remark - that at least for the time being - it would be possible to retrieve MY personal set(s) of SoG counters from any situation, because likely these are the only ones having clipped corners. Yet, I still would have to rely on recorded knowledge of how many counters of a given type ar part of the standard counter-sheets and sets to separate my personal multiple sets...


Lt. Bush