The Crew: Journey to the Ends of the Earth

• Designer: Thomas Sing
• Publisher: Kosmos
• Players: 3-5
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4ggCNWx
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Travel around the world in a race against time on the hunt for Charlemagne’s secret treasure. Follow clues that will lead you up Mount Everest, through the Amazon Rainforest, and beyond. It’s up to you how your story will end. Will you make it in time, or will you be too late? The only way to find out is by playing. The Crew: Journey to the Ends of the Earth is a co-operative trick-taking game in which players attempt to complete missions together. This game features a 25-stage journey.

To start, open the logbook to the correct stage (there are 25 pages to be played through, and it’s quite unlikely that you’ll play through them all in one sitting!) and place the crew marker token on the starting space for that stage. The time marker is placed on the denoted space.  On each page, you’re always trying to reach the airplane space in as few rounds as possible.  You will do so by completing tasks – and you’ll get to move more spaces on the map for more difficult tasks.  Regardless of whether your team succeeds or not, the time marker will move forward one space with each round.

The cards are shuffled – 4 suits numbered 1 to 9 and a black helicopter trump suit numbered 1 to 4.  The cards are dealt out fully to the players, in a 3p game, this means someone has an extra card.  The task cards are shuffled and split into two stacks, and the difficulty of the task is seen on the back of the card – based on the player count, the back tells you how many spaces the team marker moves forward on the map with a success  Some special tasks allow you to complete the task multiple times, and you’ll move forward one space for each success. Individual tasks are different, they apply to only one player.  The task is revealed and players use their communication tokens to say whether they feel confident about completing it or not; then one player is given the goal card  The group decides which top card to reveal to provide the task for the round.

The player who was dealt the black 4 is the lead player, and the group now plays a must-follow trick taking game.  Once all the tricks are played, the group checks to see if they have accomplished the task.  The hand can also be stopped early if the group has definitively succeeded or failed!  If you succeed, move the team marker ahead the number of spaces specified on the task card. Some stages will have disruptions in the path, and your team marker must always stop movement as the space prior to the disruption, all other movement is lost. 

Once per stage, you can discard the top task of each stack of tasks (if you don’t like the difficulty level on it).  However, you can never discard random tasks.   Also, note that many spaces have pictures on them, and they put unique rules into play for those rounds.  Some examples:

• Hiking Boots – team must always choose the lower difficulty task
• Skis – in this hand, whenever a player plays the Blue 7 (showing skis), all players pass their cards to the left after that trick
• Bicycle – players with a bicycle card in their hand are not allowed to talk
• Cable car – if you fail on this space, your team marker goes back to the start of the path!

There are plenty more options, but this should give you a feel for the variety that your team will encounter along the way.

Continue playing hands until either the team marker makes it to the final step of the path (the airplane). At this point, you record the score for the stage:

• If the team marker arrives first: score a negative score equal to the steps away from the end for the time marker
• If it is a tie: 0 points
• If the time marker arrived first: a positive score equal to the number of spaces required to reach the end AFTER the time marker reached the end

At the end of the whole adventure, drop your single highest score and then sum up the rest.  The lower the total sum, the better your team did!

My thoughts on the game

This is the third installation in the wildly successful Crew series, and my group was really raring to go when we heard about it.  We actually got a first glimpse at it back in April at the Gathering of Friends, but it was still a bit of a rough prototype, so it was not something that we could make any judgements on.  We were able to play a bit and got a feel for the new things, but as with most games, it’s best to wait for the final product before writing a review.

This new version is quite different from its predecessors in that you are trying to get through a travel book, with each page being a mini-campaign, and the book has 25 of these to get through.  Previous versions had a logbook with 50 specific things to tackle.  Here, the tasks come up a bit more randomly from the task card deck.

The rules are surprisingly thick, coming in at 24 pages.  It helped that I was already familiar with the other two versions of the Crew, so much of it was repeat information.  I will say that I did not find the organization of rules to be great – it was hard to figure out the flow of the game AND I already was familiar with the franchise!   In any event, all the rules seem to be in the book, but be sure to read it cover to cover before starting as some of the things (map spaces, movement disruption, etc) are only found near the end of the book, not in the flow of things when talking about other related topics.

I’ll go ahead and make a disclaimer now.  I’ve not finished the entire 25 stage journey, and I’ll be honest with you, it’s super unlikely that any group of mine will play through the whole book.  However, it’s not because I don’t like the game – I really have liked what I’ve seen so far… but all of the groups that I’ve played with have been happy to simply consider the challenge of a single page to be a good session’s worth of The Crew^3.  None of us has really ever wanted to calculate our score and tabulate them down in the rules (I think in part because none of us expect to finish all 25 pages with a single group, so there’s no reason to keep those scores).

Instead, it’s been fun to just pick a page, learn when the different path icons do – or play those special levels that have their own rules – and see if we can get our group to the finish line before the time marker.  Unlike the previous two versions of the game, I don’t feel like I have to play every chapter to see all the cool twists and turns because the tasks don’t come out of the book; they’re mostly all found on the cards.

It’s actually a bit liberating for me to not feel compelled to play the whole thing.  With the first two Crews, I kept track of my own progress, and with each group I cobbled together, so long as they had played enough of the game, I’d be able to skip forward in the book in my quest to get all the scenarios played.  I simply don’t have that compulsion with this one.  Rather, we’re able to take each page as a nice game in itself, and honestly, it usually turns out to be just the right amount of time to play the game before setting it aside for the next session.

The tasks on the cards are of many varieties, and there have definitely been some that are super tough.  Unfortunately, there have also been a few that have been rather incomprehensible.  I’m not sure if it is a translation issue or something else, but some of the task cards are totally vague or indistinct in the language – we’ve either had to simply throw those out or come up with a group ruling on what we think the task is supposed to be.  Again, with the huge stack of task cards, it’s not a big deal at all – but I do wish that there were some more details available in the rulebook on some of them.

The Crew: Journey to the Ends of the Earth continues the tradition of turning a trick taking card game into a cooperative experience.  If you have played any previous version and liked it, I think this one is a no-brainer to try.  If you are new to the system, this is probably the one I’d recommend starting with as the tasks are a bit more flexible and generally easier to play.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale
• Neutral.
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4g4cUdK