Okay, so I want to admit something that may seem odd coming from the person that leads a board game club — I used to be terrified of trick-taking games. Like, I’d see someone bust out Euchre at a family function and instantly realise I had somewhere I needed to be, you know?
But The Crew: Mission Deep Sea totally flipped that for me and now it’s become this crazy obsession that’s even freaking out my roommates.
I picked it up last semester and thought it’d be the perfect fit for our weekly game nights — cooperative games are always better suited for groups of players with varying levels of experience and the space mission theme seemed pretty accessible. What I didn’t anticipate was how completely it’d rewrite my perception of trick-taking games.
To date, we’ve played 47 games (yes, I track our games as I’m that kind of nerd) and I’m still learning new nuances of this game.
Cooperative gameplay changes everything, and I’m still piecing together how it does it. With regular trick-taking games, you’re essentially playing your own hand and hoping for the best. Here? You’re constantly thinking about the other players’ cards, working out how you can create this perfectly choreographed series of moves where each player wins the exact number of tricks they need. It’s like conducting an orchestra, but half the musicians can’t read the sheet music and you can only gesture to them.
When we first tried the game at my club — I’d say it was a disaster. Really, really bad. We had Jake, who’s pretty decent at Hearts, trying to win every trick out of sheer instinct. “It’s not about winning tricks,” I told him repeatedly. “It’s about winning the right tricks at the right time.” I think it took us eight failed attempts before he finally understood, but after he did? A total game-changer. Our completion rate jumped from approximately 30% to successfully completing missions either on the first or second try almost every time.
The moment of clarity for me was realising that you need to think in layers – not just what card to play now, but how that will affect the next three tricks. I started referring to this as “future proofing” (I don’t know why I do this; I spend way too much time in marketing courses), but fundamentally you’re playing chess while everyone else thinks they’re playing checkers.
There’s this one mission that perfectly illustrates what I mean. Sarah needed to win a trick with the pink seven. Sounds easy enough until you realise that she had virtually no pink cards and the rest of us had tons of them. The solution was to methodically exhaust all of the high pink cards in the first few tricks, leaving Sarah with the only available pink card when the seven appeared. However, orchestrating this without being able to explicitly discuss our hands? That’s where the magic happens.
At this point, I find myself thinking about hand management in The Crew in terms of four distinct levels of operation, which sounds pretentious, but hang with me. Level one is obviously the easiest to explain – what am I going to play in the current trick? But then there’s the process of establishing the next trick, which is where most people trip. There are plenty of times when the best move is to lose a trick intentionally to ensure you have the upper hand for what comes next.
Example from our last game night: I had the green nine as a task card, however, Emma had the green rocket (the highest green card). Rather than get upset about being dealt a bad hand, I realised I could make lemonade out of lemons. When Emma drew a blue card as her opening card, I chose to play my highest blue card to win the trick, which gave me the opportunity to lead the next trick with a green card. Emma had no choice but to win the next trick with her rocket, which allowed me to then play the nine, knowing she would pick it. Boom, task done.
Level three refers to what I call “mid-round positioning”, which is essentially ensuring that the right people have control at the correct points during the middle of the round. Who needs to be out of a certain suit by trick five? Who should be leading the final trick? These types of decisions are often made in the first couple of tricks.
Level four is the full-round vision thing, where before anyone has even played a single card, you are attempting to map out the entire sequence. Some missions are literally impossible without a very specific order of tricks, and identifying that order prior to beginning the round is the difference between success and spending 20 minutes trying to figure out where everything went wrong.
Our most thrilling win came on mission 34 – we probably spent 10-15 minutes just staring at our cards, using our communication tokens, and signaling to each other before anyone moved. The mission looked impossible at first, but by working backward from what needed to occur in the final tricks, we identified a thin pathway to victory. When we executed it perfectly, it felt like we pulled off a magic trick.
Some of the specific strategies that have saved our collective behinds dozens of times include: 1) suit stripping – willfully removing all of a player’s cards in a particular colour, forcing them to play their rockets at the perfect moment. Sounds cruel, but ultimately helps them achieve their objectives.
Sarah needed the blue 3 in one game, but she had higher blue cards that would have ruined things for her. So, Emma and I led high blue cards in the first few tricks to force Sarah to play her larger cards. By the time the blue 3 came into view, Sarah had exactly the blue 4 she needed to catch it. Gorgeous.
Rocket management is also incredibly important. New players always want to hold onto their high rockets for that epic final moment, but honestly, using them early often creates additional opportunities. I played my pink rocket in the very first trick in mission 28 simply to gain the lead so I could methodically assist the rest of the team with their objectives. A rocket that would have been worthless if we’d failed by the 5th trick would have been invaluable to us.
The timing of communication is an art form in this game. Because you have such limited opportunities to share information, every time you use a token counts. Our group developed this unspoken rule – early communication is about long-term planning; late communication is about solving short term problems. This has greatly improved our ability to coordinate without breaking the rules of the game.
The lead management aspect of the game is probably the most mind-bending part of the experience. There are times when you need a specific player to win a particular trick not because they need that trick themselves, but because they need to lead the next trick to allow another player to achieve their objective. It’s like this elaborate dance where everyone needs to be in the right place at the right time.
One of the fastest ways to kill a mission is to prematurely fire a rocket. I’ve lost count of how many games we’ve destroyed because someone fired a rocket “just to be safe” and their teammate needed to win that trick with a different card. We failed mission 19 four times because Jake kept “helping” when we didn’t need him to. Eventually, I had to tell him, “Just assume we can handle ourselves unless we signal otherwise.” Game changer.
The other major mistake is failing to analyse the task distribution before you begin playing. If someone needs three specific tricks, they’ll need to lead the round multiple times. If someone needs cards of the same colour, they’ll likely need rockets. Taking 30 seconds to analyse who needs what before anyone makes a move has saved us from so many avoidable losses.
What I love about The Crew is how it takes this familiar mechanic and transforms it into something entirely new. Every card play is a form of communication, every trick is a step in this intricate dance. When everything falls into place – when the team performs this perfectly coordinated sequence where every member of the team receives exactly what they need in precisely the right order – it produces a gaming high that’s difficult to describe.
We’re currently on mission 42 and I’m still uncovering new layers of strategy. Each mission presents new challenges that require adjustments to our approach, which prevents it from becoming stale or routine. That’s relatively rare in games.
Funny thing is, The Crew has given me so much confidence with other trick-taking games. For some reason, understanding the cooperative aspect has also helped me grasp the competitive aspects better. I brought it out at a family dinner a few weeks back and I actually competed favorably with my uncle who has been playing card games since I was born.
So, if you are intimidated by trick-taking games or if you feel like you have them figured out, The Crew will completely disrupt your head in the best possible way. Just remember — you’re not just playing cards, you’re conducting a symphony. Think three tricks ahead, believe in your teammates, and get ready for your head to hurt in ways you never thought possible. Trust me, though, it’ll be worth it.
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