Everyone knows I adore trick-taking games. In my humble opinion, the original Crew game changed the landscape of trick-taking and opened up the genre to a new audience of gamers. Since then, the whole genre has expanded in every direction and trick-taking has its own corner of the gaming world. Lovely!
Does this new version of The Crew, the third version, offer anything new? How does it stack up against its siblings? Well, read on to find out; my fellow ’Crewers’ and I have spent the last week or two trying to get to the ends of the earth, for better or worse, it was certainly an entertaining ride.
The Crew
For the uninitiated, The Crew is a series of trick-taking, co-operative card games. While I will not go into what trick-taking is in any depth, it's basically a game where the leader of the group plays a card and all others must play a card of the same suit if they can and the highest card played of the lead suit wins. In The Crew games, your team must complete several missions while trick-taking and progress through a light campaign.
The first Crew had quite basic missions and the follow-up, set under the sea, improved on that with much more variety in the mission structure and made it far easier to play outside of the game’s campaign, in an ad-hoc manner. This version tweaks the mission structure even more, adds maps and vehicles and fleshes out the campaign a smidge, reworking the trick-taking in weird and wonderful ways.
The Narrative
What I enjoyed with both the previous Crew games’ narrative is that they were light and breezy. A small bit of flavour text before every mission. Whether you read them or not, they did not ‘really’ matter. I read them the first time through and after that just played random hands with the second Crew Game.
In this one, you are racing to find Charlemagne's secret treasure. Rather than being a small bit of flavour text before each mission, you have blocks of flavour text on special missions and they are certainly more sporadic than before. While I slightly miss the small bits of flavour between missions, there is still enough story to give a bit of weight to what you are doing.
Maps and a Race against the Clock
The campaign in Journey to the Ends of the Earth is the biggest change in this one. Rather than mission after mission with random tasks for the whole team, this one has maps to navigate and special missions. It also comes with two meeples, I know, right? Meeples in a Crew game, awesome!
Most missions have a map; each map is a race through a section of your quest for Charlemagne's secret treasure. You will be hacking through forests, riding helicopters and even mounting donkeys. While all this is cracking off, you will be racing a timer, which will also set your score for each mission. The timer will always move one space and how far you move depends on what mission you do and quite often, how well you do at it.
Missions
Rather than being a number of missions divided up between the team, the third Crew game has you doing just one mission each hand. While I did miss the mission selection and number of missions from the last game, I did feel this setup felt more co-operative and also gave the devs space to stretch what missions could be included. Although, I did find the difficulty very sporadic.
Each mission has a value on the back for each player count, this value dictates how far you can travel on the map and as I said above, will garner how fast you travel and you end of round score. There are different types of missions too, allowing you a little bit of choice when selecting what you want to go for in this hand. You have standard tasks, special tasks and random tasks. Standard tasks are your run-of-the-mill stuff, while special and random mix things up and can have you move more or less depending on how well you do.
There are even single-player missions, but unlike previous games, you only get one for someone to try and achieve, which feels like a slight step backwards. Maybe when these single-player missions come out, you could go to another deck of single-player missions and revert back to the mission structure of the second game. That would keep the more co-operative missions from this game but now and again, give everyone their own challenges to do.
You can discard two tasks per mission and how much you beat the clock by on the map will be your score. If the clock beats you, however, your score will be the number of missions it takes you to reach the end of the page, as a negative score.
Special Missions
Every few pages, you are treated to a special mission. These missions no longer use the cards but have some bombastic way to have you climb mountains, tour Africa or some other sort of adventuring. They were rewarding, fun and amongst some of my favourite parts of this campaign. How many attempts it takes you and how well you do, gives you a positive or negative value to add to your score. I really did look forward to each one. Brilliant stuff!
Components
Apart from the aforementioned Meeples, what’s in the box is roughly the same as previous titles. A deck of cards, a campaign, rulebooks and a few cardboard tokens. I found the cards to be of good quality, especially for a game at this price point, and everything to be well made. My only issue with the production and components was a few task ambiguities and a few rulebook errors. These were by no means a major issue; they just took a little shine off the whole thing.
Final Thoughts
I love all versions of The Crew. I would rank Journey to the Ends of the Earth as a tied favourite with Mission Deep Sea, the second game. The first set the stage, the second made it far more replayable and this one bends its mission format in weird and wonderful ways.
I love racing through the map, I adore the special missions but I feel something is missing from the mission cards from the second game. I think the perfect mix would be everything from this game but when a single-player mission comes out, you go back to the decks from the second game so all players have single-player missions spread between them. Otherwise, I prefer everything about this one. It's brilliant.
I found that this game felt more co-operative than the others. Choosing what missions to do, which routes to take on the map and a shared singular mission brought the team together towards a more common goal. I did not think it could be done but the developers have made this game more rewarding and certainly more team-focused.
I am certainly excited for the future in the series. Maybe unlockable cards or items? Have that and the mixture of missions from the third and second games and Kosmos is on to another winner indeed. If you like the Crew games, trick-taking or cooperative card games, you cannot find many better than this one. It's a fun time to be had indeed. Right, I am off to ride a jet ski, climb a mountain and try yet again, to find Charlemagne's treasure.
