Card Counting in The Crew: Track Every Color

You cannot talk about your cards, but every card your teammates play is public. Tricks you have won go face down, and you may look back only at the most recent one, so the count lives in your head. The good news is that the deck is small and regular: four colors of nine cards, 1 to 9, plus four rockets. That makes counting easier here than in most trick-taking games.

Why counting matters in a co-op

In a competitive card game, counting helps you beat the table. In The Crew, it helps you avoid failing your own crew. The two questions that decide most tricks are:

• Who can still follow this color? If a teammate is out, they can drop any card, including a rocket.
• Which high cards are still out? If the 9 and 8 are gone, your 7 may now be the top card, and it will win any trick of that color.

Start with your own hand

Before the first trick, count each color in your hand. Everything you do not hold is with your teammates. If you hold four blue cards, the other five are spread among them. If you hold none, all nine are out there.

At four players, each hand has ten cards, and the average is a little over two cards per color. Long colors (four or more) and voids (none) are where the action is.

The odds a teammate is out of a color

Here is a number every crew should feel in their bones. At four players, if you hold some cards of one color, what is the chance that at least one of your three teammates holds none of it? These figures come from dealing the other cards of the real deck evenly among three hands of ten.

Read it this way: the more of a color you hold, the fewer are left to share, and the likelier someone is out. A teammate who is out can trump your lead with a rocket or drop a card you did not expect.

That changes how you lead:

• Leading a short color is usually safe at the start. Everyone else likely has some, so the trick plays out as expected.
• Leading a long color is riskier. With five or six in your hand, there is a fair chance a teammate is out. If a task card is in that color, it might land in a trick someone trumps by surprise.

What to track during play

You do not need to remember every card. Track these three things:

1. The task colors. For each color with an open task, keep a rough count of how many have fallen.
2. The top cards. Note when each 9, 8, and 7 falls. These decide who can still win a color.
3. Who has shown out. When a player does not follow suit, they are out of that color for the rest of the mission. Remember it. It is the most useful fact a trick gives you.

Rockets count too

Four rockets, and the commander holds the 4. Every time one falls, tick it off. When all four are gone, color tricks can only be won by the led color, and your plans get much more reliable.

Counting tells you when to signal

Your count can point to the signal your crew most needs. If you know you hold the last high card in a task color, a top signal tells your teammate who owns that task that you can cover them, or that you need to stay out of the way. If a teammate’s play shows they are out of a color, you may not need to signal about that color at all.

A simple practice drill

Play a mission as normal, but before each trick, one player quietly writes how many cards of each color have fallen. At the end, compare the notes to the real count. After a few missions, the count runs in the back of your head without effort.

For more on why games like this train attention, see our piece on analysis paralysis, which uses The Crew as an example of a game you cannot fully solve because you never see the other hands.