The Crew: Family Adventure

• Designer:  Thomas Sing
• Publisher:  Kosmos
• Players: 3-5
• Age: 8+
• Time: 15 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link:  https://amzn.to/4k2kJj7
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

The Crew: Family Adventure crossed the gameplay of The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine with the setting of The Swiss Family Robinson. Players find themselves stranded on a deserted island and have to find their way around together. Eating, sleeping, making decisions — how will the adventure end?  Three to five players play cards one after the other — and without talking to each other — until each mission is completed. A gameboard, island marker, various tokens, and special cards help players keep track of the game and offer opportunities to influence the course of the missions. 

This edition of the game spans 35 missions, which you play through one at a time – they are all found in the logbook.  It is recommended that you play the missions in order, but you can, of course, play them in any order that you like.   To play, you consult said logbook to figure out which game materials you will need for the particular scenario as well as a little bit of the story which explains what is going on and what you need to do to win.

The gameboard and the grid card are placed on the table.  The rules for the scenario will tell you how many cards will be played, and a marker is placed on the grid card to remind you.  The three rows are color coded (seen on the grid card).  The deck of 21 cards is dealt out to the players, and each player also gets a face down special card.  Each player also gets a communication token (usually starting green side up, but the rules for a specific scenario may say otherwise).  Finally, place out the appointed hammock tokens for the group. Whichever player was dealt the green 3 is the starting player.

You will then play a trick-taking card hand – though the following rules are a little different than a usual trick-taking game.  In this case, it’s more like UNO where you can follow either the suit or the rank of the previous card.  Furthermore, you do not place all the cards in a single discard stack, but rather, you play cards into three different rows, each up to four cards. (Though early on, you may only be able to play into one or two rows).  The goal for each scenario will be clearly stated – usually, playing specific cards to certain rows or locations.  Mark these cards with target markers on the board so that players can see what need to be played.

On your turn, you can either play a valid card or turn over a hammock token.  Again, a valid card is one that has the same color or number as the previously played card.  You can use the island marker on the board to show the most recently played card so that it’s easy to see what is a valid play (by looking at the row/column where the marker is).  

If you cannot or choose not to play a card, you can flip over a hammock token to skip your turn.  One of these tokens has a shell on the back side, if you flip this one over, your team gets access to another special card.

The special cards can be played in addition to a regular card. Each has a special action associated with it.  Once played, the special card cannot be used again this round.

• Trade a card with a teammate
• Ask for a specific card; whoever has it must give it to you, and you must then play it
• Play two cards on your turn, one after the other
• Ignore following rules this turn
• Play diagonal from the previous card (based on the board)
• Play in a row/column one over

Remember that the players are not allowed to communicate with each other while playing.  Well, unless you use your communication token.  If you use your communication token, you reveal one of the cards in your hand face up on the table (it can be a regular card or your special card).  Everyone else can see it until you play it.

A mission is successful if the objectives have been met when the stated number of cards has been played.  A mission is lost if the objectives are not met; or when a player cannot play a legal card and does not have a hammock to turn over. 

My thoughts on the game

I’ve played all the previous versions of The Crew, so I was pretty excited to give this one a try.  Our group of three ended up playing through the entire set of scenarios in a single setting.  We had six failures along the way, so we played a total of 41 hands of the game in that evening. The rules make this game sound like it plays a bit easier – and our limited number of fails proves this point.  

The game also includes a bit more narrative than the others.   The key here is “a bit more”.  Each of the 35 scenarios included a few paragraphs that forward the “story line”.  It’s clever enough, but let’s just say that I’m not looking to read a novelization of this particular story…  One of the things that we liked was that the restriction or goals of the scenario reflected the narrative of that particular passage.  

In fact, we started to have a bit of fun in our run through the game – I would set up the game board with the goals and restrictions, and then the other members of the group would invent their own next chapter to the story… and then I would read the actual passage from the book and we’d see how close they were able to come to the actual story.

Many of the scenarios had fairly simple goals – though there were a few more complex ones that were quite interesting (and also accounted for the majority of our fails).  The game does provide a number of tokens to help you represent the different goals on the board, but they certainly don’t work for all of the scenarios.  I would have liked there to be a few more tokens to use – and there was definitely space left on the punchboard to have a few more counters included.

The game is a lot easier due to the special cards which give players a one-time rule-breaking action.  These cards can also be traded or exposed via card communication rules.  While you can’t communicate verbally, a well timed special card can help your team be victorious.   There are a few times when certain cards simply aren’t relevant or useful due to the specific scenario conditions; but on the whole, they are a nice benefit to help you achieve your goals.

We definitely enjoyed our play of the game, and we were able to finish in one sitting given the relative ease of the scenarios. However, with younger players, this would be a nice level of difficulty (and hence the reason why this is titled The Crew: Family).  I don’t know if the regular game group will play this again, but it will likely get a good deal of play this summer at family events and at the lake house.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Larry:  This simpler version of The Crew is based on Crazy Eights, rather than trick-taking.  It’s reasonably clever, but less challenging and with a bit less control than the original two games.  That seems ideal, given the intended audience, so while I don’t have much interest in playing again, I think Sing accomplished his goal with the design.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y, Steph
• Neutral. John P, Larry
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link:  https://amzn.to/4k2kJj7