How to play The Crew

The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine is a co-operative trick-taking game by Thomas Sing for three to five players (with an official two-player variant). Rather than competing for the most tricks, you and your crewmates must steer specific cards — called tasks — to the players who have been assigned them. Complete every task and the whole crew wins the mission; fail a single one and everyone loses together.

The game unfolds as a campaign of 50 missions, each adding a new rule or constraint — a required order of task completion, a teammate who must win no tricks at all, or ever-scarcer chances to communicate. Because you cannot openly discuss your hand, every card you play is a clue to your teammates. Reading the table well and trusting your crew's signals is the real heart of the game.

New to trick-taking? A trick is one mini-round: someone leads a card, everyone else adds one card each, and the best card takes the lot. Two rules drive everything — you must play the led color if you have it, and the highest card of that color wins unless a trump (here, a rocket) lands on it. The Crew's twist is that winning tricks isn't the goal; steering them is. Some of the best plays in the game are deliberately losing a trick so exactly the right teammate wins it.

What's in the box, and what each piece does at the table:

• 36 color cards (values 1–9 in pink, blue, green, and yellow) — the deck you play tricks with. Each color also carries its own symbol, so the suits stay readable for colorblind crews.
• 4 rocket cards (values 1–4) — the trump suit: any rocket beats every color card, and among rockets the highest wins. Whoever is dealt the rocket 4 is this mission's commander.
• 36 task cards (small twins of the 36 color cards) — the mission objectives. A task drafted to you means you must win the trick that contains that exact playing card.
• 10 task tokens (numbers 1–5, four arrow tokens, one Ω) — difficulty modifiers laid on task cards: number tokens fix an absolute order (1 before 2 before 3…), arrow tokens only a relative one (› sometime before ››), and Ω marks the task that must be completed last. Violating the order fails the mission on the spot.
• 5 radio communication tokens (1 per player) — your one utterance per mission: placed green side up on a card you reveal to say it is your highest, only, or lowest of that color, then flipped to red once spent.
• 5 reminder cards — seat-holders: when you communicate a card it stays on the table, and a reminder card fills its place in your hand so you don't forget the card is still yours to play.
• 1 distress signal token — the crew's emergency valve: activate it before a mission's first trick and every player passes one card along (never a rocket) — at the cost of logging one extra attempt.
• 1 commander token — sits in front of the rocket-4 holder as a reminder that they draft the first task and lead the first trick.
• 1 rulebook/logbook — a flip book: the rules from one cover, the 50-mission campaign logbook from the other, where you record how many attempts each mission took.

Play out the hand trick by trick — the commander leads the first trick, and the winner of each trick leads the next:

1. Lead a card. The leader plays any card face up; it sets the suit for the trick. This applies to rockets too — a led rocket makes rockets the suit everyone must follow.
2. Follow, clockwise. Each other player plays one card and must follow the led suit if able. Void in that suit? Play anything — including a rocket.
3. Resolve. The highest rocket wins the trick; if no rocket was played, the highest card of the led suit wins. You are never obliged to win: following suit with a deliberately low card is legal, and often the whole point.
4. Check the tasks. If the trick contains a card matching a task, and that task's owner won the trick, the task is fulfilled — turn it face down (one trick can fulfill several tasks, and consecutive order tokens completed in the same trick are fine). If the wrong player wins a task card, the mission fails immediately: reshuffle everything, redeal, draw fresh tasks, and log another attempt.
5. Stack and continue. The winner sets the trick aside face down — only the most recently won trick may be looked at — and leads the next one.

Communicating. You may never say, show, or hint at what is in your hand — except through your radio token, exactly once per mission, and only before a trick — any trick, including the first, once the tasks have been drafted — never during one. Reveal one color card (never a rocket) face up in front of you and place the token green side up on it: at the top of the card, it is your highest of that color; in the middle, your only one; at the bottom, your lowest. The statement must be true when you place it. The card remains part of your hand — take a reminder card so you don't forget it — and when you eventually play it, flip your token to its red side.

A trick in practice. Ana was dealt rocket 4, so she is commander; drafting first, she takes the pink 1 task because the pink 9 is in her hand. Before the first trick, Beto communicates: he reveals his green 9 with the token at its top — his highest green. Ana leads the pink 9; Beto follows suit with the pink 5; Carla, void in pink, sheds a yellow 2 rather than waste a rocket; Diego follows with the pink 1. Ana's 9 takes the trick with the pink 1 inside it — task fulfilled, she flips it face down and leads the next trick.

The crew wins the mission the instant every task has been fulfilled — you don't even play out the remaining tricks. You lose the instant a task becomes impossible: the wrong player wins a task card, or a task-token order is violated. There is no partial credit and no elimination — the whole crew shares one fate, reshuffles, and retries the same mission as often as it takes, logging one more attempt each time (plus one if you used the distress signal).

Across the campaign, the logbook records how many attempts each of the 50 missions cost you — that tally, not any single victory, is the crew's real score. Strategically: draft tasks your hand can genuinely deliver, spend your one communication early enough for the crew to plan around it, and treat your low cards as lovingly as your high ones — deliberately losing a trick to exactly the right teammate is this game's most common winning move.