The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine

What I like about The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine

Cooperative trick taking actually works

The main difference between The Crew and your normal trick taking game is that you aren’t trying to beat each other. Every player gets a specific job that needs to happen, usually that a certain player needs to win a certain card. Sometimes you get to choose those goals. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes one person needs to win multiple specific cards, or the cards need to be won in a certain order, or there is another rule layered on top because apparently the game decided the normal version wasn’t making you feel dumb enough yet.

If any player fails their goal, everyone loses.

I think being on the same team actually removes some of the stress of a traditional partnership trick taking game. You are no longer trying to live up to your partner’s expectations about bidding correctly or playing the exact card they thought you should play. You can still play the wrong card and let everyone down, obviously, but now everyone is in the same boat… erm… ship, space ship. And since the missions are so short, nobody has time to be mad about it. You deal the cards again and try to figure out what you all missed.

You learn how your group thinks

The communication rule is probably the part that makes the game work. You can normally show one card and give a very specific bit of information about it, that it is your highest card in that color, your lowest, or your only card. You can’t explain WHY you are showing it or what you want people to do with that information. They have to figure that out.

If you play with the same people long enough, you start to develop a group language. Not an actual language, because I think that starts to break the point of the game, but you learn how people play and what sort of things they normally notice. You have to trust that someone is playing a card for a reason, even if you have no idea what that reason is yet.

I have played Hanabi with people who gamed the communication system so hard that it stopped feeling like the same game. The Crew is harder to do that with. I am sure people CAN, people will optimize the fun out of anything if you give them enough time, but our group never really reached that point. We got better at understanding each other without turning every clue into some prewritten code.

It isn’t really a campaign, but it sort of is

The Crew isn’t a campaign game in the normal sense. There are no stickers, destroyed cards, branching story, or real spoilers. You could open the book to mission 37 and play it if you wanted to, although I am not sure why you would do that to a new group.

But there is a progression to it. The first missions teach you how the game works, then it slowly adds new requirements and starts combining them. More importantly, the group gets better together. You start recognizing which goals are dangerous, when a certain card needs to be protected, and when someone is obviously trying to communicate something even though you aren’t quite sure what it is. It isn’t just teaching the rules, it is sort of training the group.

I think that is why playing it with the same people matters. You can swap people in and out and the game will still function, but you lose some of that progress that exists outside of the mission book.

Losing doesn’t feel that bad

Most of the time, after you lose, you can look back and find the exact spot where things went wrong. Someone played a card too early, misunderstood why another person gave a clue, or didn’t realize one of the ordered goals was about to become impossible. Very rarely did we look at a finished game and think there was absolutely nothing we could have done.

There are bad deals. I don’t want to pretend every mission is some perfect puzzle where the solution was always sitting there waiting for us. Sometimes the cards just make your life miserable. But a mission might take around 10 minutes, sometimes much less if you screw it up fast enough, so even a terrible loss isn’t that painful.

Our longest one took 11 attempts. That sounds bad, but I have spent longer losing one game of plenty of other board games. Here, we just added another play to the log and tried again. Classic mistake if anyone is using play count as a meaningful statistic.

It is pretty easy to teach

The Crew is taking most of its rules from classic card games instead of asking people to learn a bunch of modern board game systems. If you already understand trick taking, most of the game is already familiar. If you don’t, the early missions are simple enough to teach it.

That doesn’t mean the entire game is easy. The later missions will make experienced players stare at a hand of cards like they have never seen numbers before. But getting someone through the first few missions shouldn’t be a problem.

It is also mostly cards and a few chits. The box is bigger than it needs to be, but you could throw everything into a few tuckboxes and have a very portable game if you wanted. Not a major positive, but I like when a game gets this much play without needing a 20 pound box full of miniatures.

Finishing all 50 missions felt like an accomplishment

We played this for over 2 years. Again, that is not 2 straight years of The Crew, we aren’t crazy, but it was something we kept coming back to with the same group. Completing it felt like we had actually finished something together.

The last mission was also surprisingly not that bad. I expected mission 50 to be the hardest one, because that is normally how these things work, but I think mission 49 was probably worse for us. In general, anything involving the >, >>, and >>> ordered goals tended to give us the most trouble. Our brains apparently did not enjoy needing to win specific cards AND remember that everyone had to do it in the right order.

Part of me wanted the final mission to be one last horrible wall, but I think I am glad it wasn’t. We had already put the work in. We got to finish.