How to Play The Crew

The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine is a card game about winning tricks, like Hearts or Spades, with one big change: you all win or lose together. Each mission says which cards must be won and by whom. The catch is that you cannot talk about what you hold. The game gives you one small, careful way to share a single fact about your hand, and that is it.

This lesson walks the The Crew teach sheet in order. It follows the English rulebook and logbook from Thames & Kosmos, the North American publisher for KOSMOS. Thomas Sing designed the game, and it won the Kennerspiel des Jahres, the German award for connoisseur games, in 2020.

What is in the box

• 40 large playing cards. Four colors (pink, blue, green, and yellow), each numbered 1 to 9, plus four rocket cards numbered 1 to 4.
• 36 small task cards. One for every color card. Rockets have no task cards.
• Tokens. Ten task tokens, five radio communication tokens, and one distress signal token.
• A commander token and five reminder cards.
• One rulebook with the logbook printed on the back half, holding all 50 missions.

The game plays 3 to 5. A 2-player variant is in the rulebook, and we cover it in a later lesson.

Setup

1. Shuffle all 40 large cards and deal every one of them face down. With four players, everyone gets ten. With three, one player gets an extra card, and the last card left after the final trick is never played.
2. Everyone puts a radio communication token in front of them, green side up, with a reminder card nearby.
3. Put the distress signal token face down.
4. Shuffle the small task cards into a face-down pile and keep the task tokens handy.
5. Open the logbook to your mission. It tells you how many task cards to turn up, and any special rule.
6. Look at your hand. Whoever holds the 4 rocket says so. That player is the commander for this attempt and takes the commander token.

How a trick works

The commander leads the first trick by playing any card face up. Going clockwise, everyone plays one card. That set of cards is the trick.

• Follow suit. The first card sets the suit. If you have a card of that suit, you must play one. If you do not, you may play anything.
• Highest of the suit wins. A card of a different color can never win, even a 9.
• Rockets are trumps. A rocket beats every color card. You may only play one into a color trick when you cannot follow suit. If more than one rocket is played, the highest rocket wins. Rockets also count as their own suit: if someone leads a rocket, everyone with a rocket must follow with one.
• You never have to win. You may play low on purpose, even when you could take the trick.

The winner sets the trick aside face down and leads the next one. Only the most recent trick may be looked at again.

Tasks: who must win what

Each task card matches one color card. When the mission asks for tasks, turn that many task cards face up in the middle. The commander takes one first, then the others take one each, clockwise, until none are left. Some players may end up with several tasks and some with none.

A task is done when its owner wins a trick that contains that card. Flip the task card over. The mission succeeds the moment every task is done. But if anyone wins a card that sits on someone else’s task, the mission fails at once. You reshuffle, deal again, take new tasks, and try again.

The one way to talk

You may not show, say, or hint at your cards. Each player gets one radio communication per mission attempt, used before a trick, never during one.

To use it, place one color card face up in front of you. It stays in your hand for play; everyone just knows you have it. Then put your radio token on it:

• Top: this is your highest card of that color.
• Middle: this is your only card of that color.
• Bottom: this is your lowest card of that color.

One of the three must be true, and rocket cards can never be communicated. Take a reminder card into your hand so people can see you still have a card on the table. When you play that card, flip your token to its red side.

The 50 missions

The logbook tells a story across 50 missions, each with its own rules. The first few take only minutes. They grow harder as you go, adding things like tasks that must be won in order. The rulebook suggests playing them in order and writing down how many attempts each one took. Our article on why The Crew is such a good teaching game explains why the ramp works so well.