Attention astronauts! Can you and your team complete 50 missions to discover whether or not the suspected ninth planet actually exists? Can you work as a team? Can you master challenges, communicate effectively, and achieve your mission???
The Crew is a trick taking game, played cooperative by 3-5 players ages 10+. The game has a unique style – the journey includes 50 missions with different conditions for success that can be played through consecutively or randomly, depending on how organized you want your mission to be. Some missions are very short, while others are more complicated.
Here’s how to play:
Assign one player to be the commander and deal out the number of task cards and other tokens specified by the mission to each player. There are two types of cards: 40 large playing cards and 36 small task cards. 4 of the 40 large playing cards are Rocket Cards, numbers 1-4. These are trump cards.
Give every player a communication token. Deal out the entire deck of large playing cards evenly between the number of players.
This is Mission #6 and it specifies 3 task cards and the “before” and “after” task tokens. Divide the 3 task cards among the players. The team gets to decide who gets what.
The challenge of this mission is to fulfill the Blue 3 task card anytime BEFORE the Green 8 card. The Yellow 5 card task card can be fulfilled at any time.
The player with the Rocket 4 card is the commander and and always takes the first task card.
The Crew is a trick taking game, so the first person to play a card decides the suit for the whole trick. Subsequent players MUST play a card of that color if they have it, and the highest card in that suit wins the trick.
Players CANNOT tell which cards they have in their hands. They can only use a radio communication token to indicate specific information based on the placement of the token on the card. If the token is
- At the top of the card = highest card of this color in your hand.
- In the middle of the card = your only card in this color.
- At the bottom of the card = your lowest card of this color.
Keep your communicated card out on the table for everyone to see and take a moon card in your hand to remind you to use your communicated card eventually.
And here is the most important part: “A task is fulfilled when a crew member wins a trick containing the playing card matching one of his or her task cards.”
The challenge is for everyone to play the right cards so that the person with the trick card ends up with that same playing card in a trick they win.
It may sound easy, but it is a brain-bending challenge to do this without discussing cards! If the team can successfully fulfill the task cards in the order designated by the mission and task tokens, they complete the mission and get a little bit closer to discovering (or not) that elusive ninth planet!
The Crew is a really fun but very challenging educational family game that would supplement any space study unit. Take some time to learn about astronauts, rockets, past/present/future space missions and more, and then challenge yourself to a game of The Crew.
Thanks to Kosmos for sharing with us!
