In the cooperative adventure, The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, 1-4 players work together to complete a series of 50 increasingly challenging missions into deep space. They’re drilling down into the hardest difficulty level on the very first play. Because the game uses a standard deck of playing cards (along with a handful of special cards), the fact that it’s a trick-taking game, and the sheer variety of objectives from mission to mission do a lot to mitigate the feeling of “sameyness” that can sometimes plague adventure games in which the outcomes seem to be largely preordained.
The innovative nature of The Crew immediately caught my attention when I first played the game. You see, this is not your regular trick-taking game. Whenever I play games from this genre, I can always expect to compete against my fellow players, matching wits while keeping a running tally of who’s in the lead. But The Crew forces you to work together with your fellow players (unless you’ve tried the “can I play this one solo?” variant, but that’s another story). You’re completing missions. In a trick-taking game! How well it worked just blew my mind. And yet there it was; we were on our way to Jupiter, and the stupendous journey had been made possible by the impressive game design.
The game progresses through a series of increasingly tough missions, with varied objectives. This campaign-style progression ensures the game remains engaging; fresh; almost story-like in a way most strategy games aren’t. And speaking of story, the narrative in Company of Heroes is provided by the mission crust and the in-game events. It’s kept me engaged for many nights now, partly because it’s just flat-out fun to command little armies of men and tanks around a gorgeous real-time map. I’m a fan!
The most salient aspect of The Crew is its simplicity of access. The game is not just easy to teach but also easy to set up, so whether I am traveling or have a five-minute lull, it is the game of choice for me to play in co-op. If new players are joining me, they will quickly understand the core concepts and be ready to play immediately. When they are first setting up, they don’t have to make many (or any) choices that will affect the outcome of their mission. Nor do they have to figure out what to do when their turn begins. In short, with The Crew, players can get down to the business of cooperation right away.
Taken as a whole, the Quest for Planet Nine is a masterwork in the space of cooperative games. It has real tension and build-up even if the narrative elements are shared in a way that feels fairer at the end than how Mansions of Madness and other accomplishable games play out. If somehow you’ve gone into the game and didn’t enjoy it, it won’t be because of the distinct lack of imagination in opening new or unique paths for how gamers can enjoy reported experiences in the space of cooperative board games.
The setup is as follows:
The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine is a cooperative trick-taking game that takes place over 50 tiny missions in three chapters of increasing difficulty. This simple setup allows for a sense of progression as players learn the ropes while exploring a goofy narrative. The narrative pretext is that the entire Earth has been gearing up to send a series of manned missions to a newly discovered planet at the edge of our solar system because of some poorly defined “disturbances.” Some voyages take hours, others take weeks; all of them take place in deep space and thrive on gamesmanship and technical know-how. The Crew’s naturally increasing wait time between tricks places it in a space of tension similar to bridge.
The next step is to check the mission logbook. The Crew is played over a series of exactly 50 missions, each with not merely clearly defined but punctiliously particularized objectives and with many shades of difficulty from mission to mission. Players collectively choose a single mission, and then someone reads the mission’s briefing aloud to everyone. This sets up not only obviously the mission parameters but also the game’s basic story. The first mission in The Crew, for instance, has the feel and tone of a light prologue. Every subsequent mission in the game builds on this.
Once a mission is chosen, you assemble the necessary objective cards. Objective cards offer clear, concise instructions on what the player must do to succeed. Some objectives are straightforward: “Win a trick when you play card X,” for example. But others require thinking, sleight of hand, or, well, hilarious incompetence. More on that, later. El Jocoteco consists of four “missions.” Each room (or “act”) that the player progresses through in a mission corresponds to a certain level of difficulty (ranging from Elementary to High School) and a different number of task cards. These acts/tasks form the basis of the mission.
All players can easily access the communication tokens. In The Crew, you’re allowed to communicate, but only in specified portions. When I explain the rules of the game, I say, “You’re allowed to place a single communication token on one of the cards in your hand, and you can do it at any time while the game is going on. You can say, ‘This is the kind of card I have,’ and then put information about that card out there, showing it to the other players. But remember, you can only do that once per round.”
The stage is set for the game to begin. We have been dealt our cards, have selected our mission, and sit, ready to start, with a forlorn pile of the number of achievement tokens we’ll need to win sat next to two metal space shuttles. To boost Team Morale, all of those items sit on a playmat designed to look like a launchpad, with a fat human rocket drawn on it and numbers 1 through 12 emblazoned up the side. And, we have worked out that getting six of those is the magic number to win the game.
The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine obliquely blends into a gameplay soup an experience of delightful enormity that hinges on just the right mix of moments writ large and small, which you can share with your mates. The big moments have you dodging huge beam attacks against new Neptunian foes. “These guys have a lot more health than your standard enemy; meanwhile, your cards are your life. Each hit your character takes means the mission clock is ticking closer and closer to that nasty old 12 to which you must still find a new and potent strategy that will serve you in a fateful space battle.
The twist in the tale is that this isn’t a space battle at all. You have four cards to play; how you and your mates weave them together will determine the success or failure of your mission.
The main problem presented in The Crew revolves around meeting the mission’s goals, denoted by job cards. Each job card makes it clear that what one has to do above all is ensure victory in a certain round or hand of the game. Achieving the stated goal of the job is “The Supreme Discipline,” the game’s rules remark.
We keep playing the game until we finish all the “jobs” on the current “Mission” card or until we can’t complete a job because we’ve run out of the headway to do it. Even when we complete one job, we have to find a way to advance to the next step under no orders of what to do or not to do unless and until we get a “Crisis” card. We have to figure out how to play the right card with each player having access to 10% of the part of the team’s “cards in hand” for a given job to do. Although “somewhat strenuous,” it is exhilarating, not at all the same sort of feeling as you get from finishing a crossword puzzle.
Advantages
There are many good reasons why people all over the world love and laud The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine. But the first and foremost reason is that it is just plain fun. You can really tell that the folks at KOSMOS, game designer Thomas Sing, and his development team put a lot of thought into how to make The Crew not only a great new twist on the classic trick-taking genre but also an excellent game in the co-op space.
When you challenge nature as a team and succeed, you feel pretty awesome—almost as if you were members of the Challenger expedition who just planted the flag at the North Pole.
The Crew is extremely approachable, which is another big plus. New gamers, as well as folks just sitting down for a quick game, can grasp the basic play framework in a snap, learning to play with ease and enjoyment. For all its simplicity of play, the game offers a wealth of actual play that keeps experienced gamers coming back for more. Forcing difficult tactical decisions at many junctures, gamers can get into the nitty-gritty of card play very deeply. And they don’t need to take my word on any of this—The Crew has won a lot of big game awards. It’s a co-op gamer’s dream game.
The Crew’s small size and fast setup make it a great game for many situations. It’s a good choice for game night. If you need a portable game during travel, this is it. And if you just want something quick and casual to play on a weeknight, this will do well, too. Despite the game’s size and galactic theme, it can be contained in a pretty small area (which also makes it a good choice for a game you can play just about anywhere). And though the game by designer Thomas Sing and artist Marco Armbruster is challenging and has a lot of interesting cards, it’s also really easy to learn and teach.
The Crew’s themes make the game much more immersive and exciting. Each has a narrative arc that leads to some space setup. And, these setups don’t create themselves. When you reach somewhere in space, you have to do stuff.
Another standout feature of The Crew is its replayability. There are 50 individual missions in the game, and not one of them is like another. Thanks to the variety offered by the objectives of these missions and the almost countless amount of content found within them, you can spend an impressive amount of time in this game world and not see the same thing twice. Each game session delivers a fresh experience, and there’s a forced lack of communication between teammates that really allows the “anything can happen” moments to happen. Even if you’ve played through the entire deck of mission cards, odds are good that your next session is going to be unique from the previous one.
The shared sense of achievement in playing The Crew cannot be overstated; cooperation and teamwork are written into its very rules. If you are the type of person who likes playing serene and sedate games with smoothness and polish, and you also consider yourself part of a wholesome, safe, and serviceable domestic environment, and have a lot of free time, don’t look to The Crew. It is not a hasty game, nor is it one that can be played effectively by a lifeless but decorous group. Alliances must be formed.
