Game of the Month: The Crew Journey to the Ends of the Earth

Thomas Sing's The Crew: Journey to the Ends of the Earth and four hundred years of card games built to hurt you

Join us all month playing The Crew, each week we will be focusing on a new chapter in the experience.

We're trying a new thing for Game of the Month, leaderboards! When you finish a chapter you can enter your score, and we will have a leaderboard for the people that complete with the best aggregate score.

You don't have to start with Chapter 1, jump in anytime, but if you love it one week come back the next for a new challenge and to continue the adventure.

There's a moment in Hearts, usually around the sixth trick, when you figure out what the quiet person across the table is doing. They took the queen of spades on purpose. They've taken every heart so far! They're shooting the moon, and you've got about two cards left to stop them. That feeling dawning on you with dread, is what trick-taking card games run on.

Listen to the words. You shoot the moon. You squeeze them, finesse them, euchre them. In Spades you go nil, and everyone else's job is to force a trick on you. Bridge has a word for losing a contract on purpose so the other side can't win a bigger one. The word is "sacrifice." This is all vocubulary around something you do to someone else.

When The Crew came out in 2019, it took all of that, the tricks and trumps and following suit, and turned it into something you did to help each other and was an instant hit. The English edition sold out in Britain nine days after it arrived. It won the Kennerspiel des Jahres the next year, and a whole category of cooperative trick-takers grew up behind it. There was probably only one real criticism, which was the game felt like just a series of hands of cards, and didn't quite connect together. Thankfully 2026 bring a new The Crew, and it's primary innovation risk and reward follows along from one trick to the next.

Thomas Sing, the designer of The Crew, lives in Konstanz, on the German side of the Swiss border. The route for Journey to the Ends of the Earth starts there in Konstanza because, he says, all his games are a bit autobiographical. He first planned it to be themed as Amundsen and Scott racing to the South Pole, until his editor pointed out how that race ended. Thomas has said that the original Crew worked in its very first test games in 2018 and "it felt to me as if I had found the game rather than invented it." Eight years later he's still finding things in it.

If you know Hearts or Spades you know most of the rules for The Crew. Forty cards, four colors, four trumps, follow suit, high card wins. But each hand comes with a goal that tells the table whether it even wants that to happen.One goal might be "Each trick may contain at most two colors,", and now the person holding the winning card is the one in trouble. You can't talk about your hand. You have some tokens you can use to communicate, like last months pick Eternal Decks, but otherwise it is about reading your table mates.

What's new in this edition is how each hand connects to the next hand. The old Crew was a stack of ten-minute puzzles: play, pass or fail, next. Now four or five hands make a stage, and your crew races a clock across a page of a spiral-bound logbook. As The Dice Tower put it, "failing a task doesn't reset the whole mission; the clock token advances." You lose a space, with three hands left to make it up. It gives the whole experience more meaning and makes an evening of play have a wonderful shape of fun and tension. Dale Yu at The Opinionated Gamers found his groups treating a single page as "a good session's worth of The Crew” so here at Tabletop we have built a way to track your progress across the month.

The game has rough edges. Derek Thompson at Geeks Under Grace, who loves it, called the rulebook "clearly a rush job," and a few goal cards take two readings.. Minor quibbles for a fifteen-dollar box you’ll play for years.

The quiet person across the table is still shooting the moon. Still taking tricks nobody else wants, still holding their nerve for the last two cards. The difference is that when they pull it off this time, you're the one who gets to cheer.

Join us for The Crew in October at TTL