The idea is to have a cooperative trick-taking card game. It was sort of sitting there all along, for anyone who has ever played a game of Bridge or Euchre or anything similar. Those games pair you up with a partner seated across from you, and you work with them to collect all the tricks you can. It's sort of a short jump from there to the idea of putting everyone in the game on a team together.
The game comes with a booklet detailing 50 scenarios or "missions" that the team must advance through, in a multi-session affair that will take you and up to four friends many sessions to get through (depending on how often you gather and how much of game night you choose to dedicate to The Crew). There's a 40-card deck containing a 1 through 9 in four colored suits, plus a 1 through 4 in a special "rocket" trump suit. In each hand (mission), you deal these cards out to all players. It plays according to expected trick-taking rules: lead a suit; everyone must follow it if they can; highest card of that suit takes the trick unless a trump is played.
There's also a smaller deck of 36 cards -- copies of the 1 through 9 in each suit, omitting the rocket trumps. From this deck, you deal a limited number of cards face up in the center of the table, as defined by your mission parameters in the booklet. These become goals that players must draft in clockwise order around the table, specific cards which a player must win in a trick for you to win the mission. As you advance through missions, these goal cards get marked with special tokens that complicate the strategy: you might be required to take this card before that card, or take one particular card last. Some missions may present other kinds of curveballs, like designating one player at the start of the mission who will take no tricks at all during the mission.
In a game like Bridge, the bidding system is used to communicate information to partners about the cards in your hand. In The Crew, the communications rules allow each player (once per mission) to reveal one card from their hand just before beginning a trick. That trick must either be their highest, lowest, or only card of its suit in their hand -- and the player places a token indicating which of these it is. Otherwise, the group is on its own to determine whether they want to talk obliquely about strategy to nudge the game to victory, or enforce strict silence to make a win as earned as it can be.
Repeating this process through 50 ever-challenging, increasingly clever mission designs was great fun. It took only minutes for me to like The Crew, and the rest of that first session to know I'd want to come back with the same players and get as far through the booklet as we could. Sure, other campaign games may have a more compelling story, but the brisk pace of this one really hooks you in.
I would give The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine an enthusiastic grade A, but there is one shortcoming I feel worth mentioning: though it says it's for 3 to 5 players on the box, my friends who have tried with three report that it doesn't work very well at that player count. It's far easier, so much so that after release, the designer acknowledged this and "patched" the game with rules to make the 3-player experience harder. I'll maybe leave it to the reader to decide if that means A- because it was released with a key flaw, or still an A because the flaw was addressed.
In any case, the game held my interest the whole way through its campaign, and I could see playing it again with a different mix of people. The Crew is a great game that should be shared far and wide. If you're a fan of trick games or of cooperative games, it really belongs in your collection.
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