Review – The Crew: Journey to the Ends of the Earth

To this day, The Crew: Quest for Planet Nine is one of my favorite games of all time. This semester, I’ve been playing it at work over lunch with two different groups, Wednesdays and Fridays. I’ve also got a campaign going with my wife and another couple of Mission: Deep Sea, the first sequel, but I keep coming back to the sheer simplicity and cleverness of Planet Nine. But now we’re back at it again with Journey to the Ends of the Earth, and in some ways, this is the simplest Crew yet, and in other ways, it’s the most complex. Which one should you be playing? Let’s take a look!

It’s been a long time since a review has left me this conflicted. I waited until we’ve finished 40% of the campaign to say anything, just because I needed more time to sort my feelings out. In some ways, Journey is absolutely brilliant and my favorite in the series. But in other ways, the game was clearly rushed to market (probably for Gen Con) and has some very, very frustrating aspects. This entire review assumes you’ve played The Crew: Quest for Planet Nine and/or The Crew: Mission Deep Sea; you definitely should play Planet Nine first if you’ve never played The Crew before. This new game definitely feels like an “experts only” version. So, rather than speaking broadly, I’m just going to hit all the changes (or lack thereof) in a bulleted list and give you my thoughts, with a summary at the end. Here we go:

1. The Mission Booklet. At first, my friends and I all thought we would hate this, because it is so easily equated with “barely a game” cooperative party games that encourage you to just compare your score with the rulebook without having an identified “winning” and “losing” condition. However, we find that managing the task difficulty to maximize our score makes for some really interesting “meta” gameplay. So overall, I like the concept, even though…
2. The Travel Icons. Most spaces in the booklet have a special rule for the round if you’re “traveling using that particular method.” Some of them are interesting, but most of them are flat-out terrible. And the main reason for this is that so many of them are associated with icons on the cards, but the icons are poorly placed and easily forgettable, that we find them to just be annoying, and we’ll forgot to do it or we’ll remember when it’s too late. However, the icons that are more “outside” the game (like the timer advancing twice as fast), or so obvious you can’t forget (like when you only deal 7 of 10 cards to start and draw the rest throughout the tricks), those work really well. So I think the idea is fine, it’s just really poorly executed.
3. The Special Missions. Every few missions in the booklet is completely different than rest, not unlike the missions in previous games that discarded the task deck entirely for the round. These are honestly amazing, and some of my favorite rounds of playing any version of The Crew. If the book had somehow been just twenty-five of these, I would have been a happy camper!
4. One Task Per Round. I actually love this concept in theory, and often in practice, but not always. It seems to me that the germ of this entire iteration of The Crew was the designer asking himself, “Hey, sometimes in the old games, I have a specific requirement for everyone for the round, instead of for each player. What if the whole game was like that?” And some of the tasks we’ve done are truly brilliant, requiring us to completely rewire our “Crew brains.” I also just think it’s a great “headspace” giving everyone a central goal, and avoids the annoying rough edges of Mission Deep Sea where individual tasks were somewhat, if not entirely, opposed to each other. I also like the idea of “one task plus one `kicker’,” with the “kicker” being the travel icon – I just think a lot of the travel icons are poorly thought-out.  

My main problem with this system is the wide variance in difficulty, and only two piles to choose from. The one- and two-difficulty tasks are an absolute bore and feel like a waste of time to us (most of us have played Planet Nine all the way through several times, in addition to Deep Sea at least once), but the four-to-six-difficulty tasks are too rare, or the game prohibits their usefulness (e.g. with the “must stop here” icon on the travel paths). There are also times when, in an effort to get our score to be 0 or less, we are mentally prepared to do a Hail Mary… and the only tasks we can do are low difficulties. (The higher the difficulty, the farther you advance on the path, where your goal is to beat the timer to the end.) I would have vastly preferred a low (1-2), medium (3-4), high (5-6) stack setting where you could pick your poison. Or at least perhaps special “items” for the campaign we could acquire that would allow us to dismiss tasks more frequently, or repeat one. 

5. Special Tasks. There are two kinds of these, and the names and the pictures are way too similar. Both have a “3” on the back with an icon around it (the same one), to indicate the difficulty is “roughly” 3, but then one has small question marks all around it. The latter cannot be skipped and are just “surprise!” tasks that, so far to me, don’t seem especially unique. However, the other set of tasks are tasks that can be repeated on each trick, with a modifier. (For example, a modifier of “-6” means you could theoretically do the task 10 times, once on each trick, but you’d advance 4 spaces, not 10.) I absolutely love the repeatable tasks, as they have an entirely different flavor than rest and give the same vibe as trying to overkill in a video game. The other kind, I have half a mind to just remove from the deck. 
6. “Centralized” Communication Tokens. Not much to say here, other than that I love this. Rather than tokens being assigned per player, they are now in a common pool, and one player could use several of them if they wish. I think for new players, the old rule is far better, because otherwise new players might under- or over-utilize communication tokens. But for advanced players, it’s been an amazing tool, and we’ve developed a good understanding over time of when “selfish” play is absolutely the correct play. 
7. The Rulebook, Rules, and Typos. This is what has me most divided about Journey to the Ends of the Earth. It was clearly a rush job. The rulebook is disorganized and terrible. It’s still not clear to me in what order tasks are decided, hands are dealt, and decisions (if they exist) about the task are made. There’s no player aids for the travel icons, and they’re not even on the backside of either rulebook, but stuck in the middle. The log for the logbook is in the rulebook. The rulebook literally says ”6-4=3” during an example. About a dozen of the tasks are completely ambiguous or nonsense as written. There are other grammatical typos (missing letters, etc.). Even though I love the special missions, I had to reread their rules about five times before I understood enough to teach it. Nothing makes me sadder than opening a game and immediately thinking about what would be better in a 2nd edition. My solution was to remove the ambiguous tasks before we even started playing, but we’ve still run into some sequencing confusion, and the travel icons remain a frequently unsatisfying portion of the gameplay. Also, okay, I know this one is minor, but 3 tokens in the game literally look like trash that happens on punchboard sometimes (circles you can punch out but end up chucking). And chuck them I did, on accident. You can use any small token as a replacement, but still – you couldn’t’ve made the tokens look distinct? 

So what do I think about The Crew: Journey to the Ends of the Earth? I love it, warts and all. If this was a $150 game with these kinds of production mishaps, I would tell everyone to wait for a second edition. But it’s a $15 game! (And it is truly an act of kindness that KOSMOS has never increased the price of these games, even with the new versions.) Reading the rulebook will take some extra work and some extra time on the BoardGameGeek rules forums, but the payoff is worth it. Some of these missions have been the most fun I’ve ever had with The Crew, and my brain is melting in beautifully unfamiliar ways. 

I think it’s too different from Planet Nine for me to place one above the other, but I would never volunteer to play Mission Deep Sea over this one. As an aside, a complaint about this version is that you can’t just “pick a scenario and play it once real quick” like you can with the last two iterations. To that complaint I ask: in what universe would you only want to play a single round of The Crew? And Journey to the Ends of the Earth has me feeling that way more than ever.