Description
A client sends you hunting for the lost treasure of Charlemagne, and the clues lead you around the world – by train, on skis, on a Vespa, by dog sled and much more. In The Crew: Journey to the Ends of the Earth you are a crew racing against time. Like the first two games in The Crew series, it combines trick-taking with cooperation: you win or lose together.
How to play The Crew: Journey to the Ends of the Earth
The journey is split into 25 stages. In each stage you move the crew marker towards the plane, while the time marker advances one step after every task. Each round you choose one of the two tasks on top of the piles – its difficulty is shown on the back – then deal the cards and play all the tricks. You must follow the colour led, the highest card of that colour wins the trick, and helicopters are trumps. A completed task moves you forward as many steps as it is difficult.
You may not talk about the cards in your hand. Before a trick you can use a token to show one coloured card and say whether it is your highest, your only or your lowest card of that colour. Every space on the route also brings its own rule: on skis you pass cards to each other, in the fog you don't have all your cards in hand, in a storm communication is unreliable. The sooner you reach the plane, the better your score for the stage.
Why you'll love it
- Choosing a task is a gamble: an easier one is safer, a harder one gets you to the plane faster, before time catches up with you.
- The means of transport change the rules – on a bicycle you may not communicate, on a Vespa you swap a card with a teammate – so every stage plays differently.
- Nine special stages bring puzzles in which you build a pattern on the table from the cards you play.
- You add up your stage scores until the end of the journey, and at the end you may strike out your worst stage – there is always a reason for one more try.
Who is The Crew: Journey to the Ends of the Earth for
The game is for 2 to 5 players aged 10 and up, and a game takes about 20 minutes. It is fairly light, and players like it best with four. The basic rules are for three to five players; for two, the rules include a special variant with a virtual third crew member. The first stage is meant for learning, so you don't need to know trick-taking games beforehand. This is the English edition and the tasks are written in English, so some knowledge of the language is needed. Players who like to talk a lot during a game may find the silent communication hard to accept.
The earlier games in the series are available in our shop: The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, in Slovenian The Crew: Iskanje devetega planeta, and The Crew: Mission Deep Sea.
What's in the box
- 40 large cards: 36 coloured cards in four colours with values 1–9 and 4 helicopter cards with values 1–4
- 5 reminder cards
- 104 small task cards
- 14 tokens: 5 communication tokens, 5 task tokens, 3 marker tokens and a guide token
- crew marker and time marker
- journey logbook with 25 stages
- rulebook
