The Crew released in 2019, won the Golden Geek Best Cooperative Game award that year, and then continued to win accolades and awards well into 2020. Hailed as a remarkable evolution or distillation of the popular trick-taking mechanic in card games, it’s definitely been talked about by plenty in the hobby—content creators, reviewers, industry professionals, and your average gamer.

It’s a game that subverts the expectations for a trick-taking game. It’s cooperative rather than competitive—or rather the competitive edge has been reserved for players finding ways to complete the rigid objectives of a mission. Any wrong move means failure and players will have to start over. And the base game comes with 50 missions, so there is a “campaign” that the team will be able to embark on, all in an effort to reach the ninth planet (which is not the one you think it is).

A small-box game for 2-5 players, you’ll be able to take The Crew with you just about anywhere, but you can also experience it digitally on sites like BoardGameArena (which has now been acquired by Asmodee). It’s not a complex game at all, but there is strategy involved with figuring out the best way to pass on the limited information you can to the other players while pursuing each mission’s objectives.

Designed by Thomas Sing and published by KOSMOS, it’s definitely one that I think you should check out. Here we go!

What It Does

Astronauts wanted! Scientists say there is a mysterious ninth planet located at the edge of our solar system. But despite all of their efforts, so far they have been unable to provide substantial evidence of its existence. Join this exciting space adventure to find out if the theories are just science fiction or if you will discover Planet Nine.

We used to have nine planets… And then the world turned on its head and nothing made sense anymore. But now we have a chance to right that wrong! To restore balance to our lives! If you’ve watched space movies, then you know nothing ever goes wrong. This trip is going to be a breeze. Everything will function nominally and we’ll soon have Planet Nine in our sights.

Wrong! Space is awful and we’re all going to die… unless we work together. That involves a cooperative effort on the part of all players (err, astronauts).

The Crew is a card game that asks players to work together in order to complete the mission—or all fifty missions. It’s a really unique spin on trick-taking and it’s been lauded in the board gaming space as a really good time. And, as an avid card player, I think that praise is well-deserved. For the two to five players that embark on this interplanetary quest, I imagine they’ll have a blast—in a safe way.

How It Does It

Trick-taking is not a complicated mechanism in a card game. It involves trying to get an exact number of round wins spread across the different players and usually involves betting or declaring that value before play.

What Thomas Sing did, though, in order to create a novel gameplay experience was restrain that mechanism with ever-increasing challenges.

Shifting the game from a competitive to a cooperative mode encompasses more players and requires a higher degree of coordination than just two partners working together. Further restricting the communication limits also makes it a formidable task at times to discern what other players have or intend to play. Like Hanabi, it makes you wonder what the best move is and try to discover the right method of sharing information at the limited windows in which you’re allowed.

Successive missions that depend on success from the preceding one to advance means that all of these games are connected. They aren’t disparate attempts to play a trick-taking game. They are points on a thread that ties everything together. And then the mission objectives are the final obstacle for players to overcome. These objectives determine what cards need to be won by which players, when those cards need to be won, and if there are any other conditions—like certain players banned from communicating—that must be adhered to.

Mix all of that together and you’ve got a mechanical stew that tastes quite good but doesn’t make players bloated and overwhelmed.

Why You Might Like It

Why You Might Not

Final Thoughts

A cooperative trick-taking card game.

I was never not curious about this game. Spades is a favorite of mine, though it’s hard to get exactly four people together sometimes for a game. Something about the tension of going for one specific objective—with any deviation from that one line of intent being met with failure—presents such a thrilling experience at the table.

So The Crew already had my interest. Then, once I played, it had my attention. Our group burned through 11 missions in one sitting and would have kept going if it wasn’t so late at night. I have the physical copy of the game, but the pandemic makes it less likely to hit the table. I was thankful that the implementation on BoardGameArena allowed us to play this with our friends remotely. That’s neither here nor there, though. The gameplay is what matters.

Let’s go back to the 11 missions. As the 50 missions progress, the objective(s) ramp up in difficulty. You may just need one player to win one particular trick in the beginning. After time, however, you might have three players going for four different objectives and half of them need to be completed in a particular order. Those conditions must be met or the mission fails, which ratchets up the tension considerably. When you complete missions like that, it feels remarkably good. Everyone on the team is congratulating each other, talking about that pivotal piece of information shared, or commenting on how it came down to the last round of cards played. Or all of the above at the same time.

The Crew, for me, fits into a special category where the mechanisms are few, the gameplay is really accessible, but the joy and level of satisfaction as a player can be really high. That is a rare feat for board games or card games. For a lot of things in my library, the strategy and complexity rise in tandem with the enjoyment I derive from the game. Any game, then, that can make me that invested with so little that I have to manage is one that I want to keep around.

Add in the bonus of it being such a small game that I can take with me and I’m really excited to play it.

If you haven’t check out The Crew, then maybe hit that link at the top of the article to see the digital implementation on BoardGameArena, learn more from KOSMOS, or see what the community thinks on BGG.

Have you played The Crew before? Is trick-taking a mechanic you enjoy? What other card games are in your collection?

Let us know in the comments and give a recommendation for other games of which to share our first impressions.