Review

Die Crew

Reist gemeinsam zum 9. Planeten

Astronauts in front of the diamond ring of a solar eclipse, a rather neutral title and a note on the backside announcing a cooperative tricking game? Excuse me? Cooperation and trick-taking? Sounds like a contradiction.

But this contradiction turns out to be a sensational game with lots of spiffy game play and fun, offering unexpected and surprising effects.

40 cards - 1-9 in four colors plus four rocket cards 1-4, are dealt evenly to all players. Together, players select a mission from the 50 offered in the log; it is of course recommended to begin with Mission 1, but you need not play the missions in sequence. For a mission, you usually lay out the stated number of task cards; the player holding the #4 rocket card is the commander of the mission and, if there is more than one task card, selects one first. Then all other players in turn select one task each in clockwise direction, until all tasks are taken; therefore, players can have different numbers of tasks to meet. Of course, you try to select tasks that are best suited to your hand of cards. In some missions, there are also task markers that must be assigned to tasks; they all relate to the moment in the mission when the task must be met - for instance, sometime after the task with the next-lower mark, first, last, etc.

The game is best explained with examples.

Say, we have two tasks, one of the players must take a trick with the green 2 in it, another player a trick with the yellow 6 in it. The commander leads, you must follow suit but need not trick; rockets are trump and trick any color. Anytime before a trick, but not during a trick, you can use your radio token to give information about one card in your hand. You put down the card open-faced and put the token on it - in the middle of the top edge if the card is your highest of the color, in the middle of the bottom edge if the card is your lowest and in the middle of the card if the card is your only one of this color. You can play this card anytime in your turn and take a reminder card in hand, which you discard when playing the card from the table. Any other communication about cards is not allowed and you cannot use the radio token with a rocket card! If the status of the communicated card changes - the highest card in hand might become the only card in hand - you CANNOT change the position of the radio token.

There are also missions without task cards being used, for instance „you can only communicate with radio tokens after the third trick” or “the commander must take the first and last trick and at no time during the mission may a player have two tricks more than any other player”. The game also features one emergency token, which must be used after task cards have been taken but before any use of radio tokens - each player gives one card to his neighbor, left or right, but all in the same direction. Rocket cards must not be handed over. When the signal token was used, it remains active till the end of the mission, even if the mission fails and you have to play the same mission again.

You can play missions as a campaign and make a not of the number of tries you needed to complete each mission, or select any mission you want to try.

And now I have reached the limits of what a written review can communicate - I wish I could let you experience the fun, the challenge or the thrill in wondering if my friends have understood what I want to tell them with “this is my only yellow card”. Missions are fantastically varied, there is even one without task cards in which the commander asks his crew members about their health, they can only answer “good” or “bad” depending on their hand of cards; based on those answers only, the commander must select a crew member that is ill and must finish the mission without having taken a trick.

A creative use of trick-taking, offering a broad variety of missions; lots of fun to play and needs subtle communication to ensure success of cooperation. Not for nothing, the game topped the Fairplay Scout action at Spiel ’19.

Dagmar de Cassan with Maria & Walter Schranz

Players: 2-5

Age: 10+

Time: 20+

Designer: Thomas Sing

Artist: Marco Armbruster

Price: ca. 13 Euro

Publisher: Kosmos Verlag 2019

Web: www.kosmos.de

Genre: Cooperative trick-taking

Users: With friends

Version: de

Rules: de

In-game text: yes

Comments:

Ingeniously mixed standard mechanisms

Challenging and lots of fun

Simple core rules

Compares to:

Wizard, Tichu

Other editions:

Currently none

My rating: 7

Dagmar, Maria & Walter

A sensational card game in the class of Wizard or Tichu, a surprising challenge for cooperation with out communication, offering a lot of replay value.

Chance (pink): 2

Tactic (turquoise): 3

Strategy (blue): 2

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 1

Communication (red): 3

Interaction (brown): 3

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0