Re: Micro Reviews of Board Games From a Non-Competetive Perspective

This is a brief review for the new cooperative trick-taking card game "The Crew":
https://boardgamegee...ew-quest-planet-nine

With all the hype this game received, I was full expecting to be let down, but I have to say it's a pretty damn good little cooperative trick taker.

I was recently quite disappointed by the recent 2-player cooperative trick taker "Fox in the Forest Duet", which I felt was overly complicated with uninteresting choices. [The original 2-player competitive game Fox in the Forest is great btw].

But "The Crew" gets it right -- the games are fast and interesting, and the basic rules could not be simpler.

It's really built for 3 or 4 players, but I've found the 2-player variant works surprisingly well, despite sounding awful.  You essentially have a dummy hand that is half-exposed and controlled by one of the players.  But in practice it creates an interesting puzzle element and works well.

The "innovative" part of the game is the fact that you are meant to play it in a "campaign" of 50 missions of increasingly challenging tweaks to the goals.

It's not like a legacy game or a strict campaign -- people can jump in and out, each mission is a standalone thing that simply specifies different kinds of goals that need to be achieved in different orders. So there's no need to keep playing with the same group, etc.

The variety of missions and the short length of the games and the simple rules, makes it ideal for non-hardcore gamers.  Yet the strategy is rich enough to make it interesting for more serious gamers.  And the campaign of games essentially gives everyone time to get more sophisticated as they learn how to play better over the sequence of games.

Highly recommended, both for 2 players, and for mixed family groups during vacations, etc. .