For example, the mission may have a degree of difficulty of 7. Players will draw cards until the sum of the numbers on the task cards equal 7. If they draw and get to 6, then they only need a 1 value task card. If they draw a 2 or 3 value, they skip it and keep drawing until a 1 value is drawn. It’s worth noting that these aren’t the only limitations to communication. They are merely the limits on using the sonar token. Sometimes, not communicating anything is communication. And also, playing a card offsuit tells everyone else that you are out of a particular suit, which savvy players can use to their advantage. The distress token’s “active” side. The other, “inactive,” side is blank. Image by Rob Huddleston The Crew: Mission Deep Sea may get the highest score yet on games we’ll play over and over and over. Even though a single mission may only take a few minutes to play, every time we pull the game out, we find ourselves playing at least an hour. The cardboard components are nothing terribly exciting but serve their purpose well. There are the five “sonar” tokens for communicating with other players, the “distress signal” token, and the oversized “Captain” token for denoting the current first player. The logbook. Image by Rob Huddleston

Each player also receives a grey Reminder Card and a double-sided Sonar Token, which are both placed in front of them on the table. The Sonar Token is initially placed green side up. The player who has been dealt the 4 Submarine must act as the Commander for that mission. They receive the Commander Token to indicate this and must go first. There is a wide variety of challenges to be met through the task cards. There’s a huge variety in the types of tasks to complete. The logbook contains a set of boxes for each mission so that players can mark off when they complete a mission. In theory, a game of The Crewinvolves playing through all of the missions in the fewest number of tries possible.If even one task is not completed, all players fail that mission and must attempt it again from the beginning. The card art also shows a continuous underwater scene. If a mission displays this symbol, place two fewer sonar tokens in the middle of the table than there are crew members playing. In other words, no crew member has their own token. Whoever wants to communicate takes one of these sonar tokens, without any discussion or announcement, and immediately communicates according to the usual rules. As if that wasn’t enough to keep on your toes, later missions introduce further wrinkles as well as increasing the difficulty of tasks you must undertake. There might be additional limitations on how you communicate, who does what, or the way in which you go about tasks. Like the expanded set of tasks, there’s a lot of imagination on display in mission design. The Crew: Mission Deep Sea review: Verdict With 96 task cards in the game, the variety of the challenges themselves is great. And then you throw on top of that the myriad combinations of those tasks coming up together. The replay value is immense! So, it was with some trepidation and excitement that we turned to the second game in the series, Mission Deep Sea. From reading online stuff, it seems that the base gameplay is mostly unchanged – the big difference here is in the task cards.

Once the sum is reached, the players flip over the task cards drawn to see the challenge that awaits. These 40 cards are shuffled and all cards are dealt out equally (although in a three player game, one player will have more cards than the others). However, those three attributes—highest, lowest, and only—are the only things they are allowed to communicate. So if they know that a partner needs to take the 7 of a suit, and they have it, they can’t communicate that fact unless it fits one of those criteria. If they have the 8 or 9, and any cards lower than 7, then there’s simply nothing they can do.Come with us. You are about to take your first step into a larger world,” one of the cloaked figures said to me and the fact that he was quoting Obi-Wan Kenobi made it clear that it was Andrew Smith under that particular hood. I was hesitant to comply, but if I’m being honest this wasn’t even the strangest experience I’d had to start a Tuesday morning at Board Game Quest. I shrugged and followed. The aim of the game is to investigate the lost continent of Mu by completing 33 different missions of increasing complexity by working as a team, but with very limited communication permitted. Newcomers to the series should be fine beginning with either game. The original is a hair simpler to understand since all tasks are basically the same, but in both cases, the logbook helps ease players in scenario by scenario, so either version can be a good starting point. Since players cannot communicate information about their hands (thematically this is because of equipment difficulties on the crew as they dive into the ocean) they do each have one token that they can use every round to reveal a small amount of information about their hand. The token allows them to inform their teammates that a certain card played in front of them is their highest of a color, their lowest of a color, or the only card they have in that color. This is all done just by the placement of the token. Players also have access to a submarine token that acts as a distress signal of sorts and has players passing a single card to their neighbors to give a little bit of additional information.

By increasing the variability and the challenge, Sing has taken what was already a brilliant concept and made it even better. I might not have guessed that was possible, but it was. Fans of the original The Crew will certainly love this game, but those that haven’t played the first game are sure to love diving right into Sing’s world with this game. This lets you play the mission in real time. The number in the symbol represents the overall level of difficulty. Once the tasks are assigned, set the time on a device of your choosing. This little addition to the players’ repertoire of choices stops this being competitive and starts being cooperative. You can only share one fact per game, so it’s integral that what players share helps. We found that knowing your co-adventurers didn’t help all that much as you aren’t trying to outsmart them. You’re trying to help them, and no amount of strained or pained looks will say “have you got any pinks?” as clearly as sharing it in a card. Final Thoughts

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Since then, Kosmos has gone ahead and outdone themselves with the follow-up game The Crew: Mission Deep Sea! Once per mission, players may collectively decide to use the distress token. This has to be done once all of the cards are dealt and the tasks chosen, but before a card is played or anyone has communicated anything. If players agree that they might need a little extra help, they can flip the distress token over, showing it’s been used, and then, every crew member will pass one card from their hand to their neighbor. The group decides whether to pass left or right, but everyone has to pass in the same direction. Submarine cards cannot be passed. This can be used to make impossible tasks possible, or maybe just to make things a bit easier—it is, for example, generally easier to take a card you don’t have in your hand. If you’re recording plays in the logbook, you are supposed to circle the distress symbol there, and increase the number of attempts by one as a “penalty.” Note that the signal can only be used once per mission, meaning that if you use it and still fail the mission, you cannot use it again until you find a way to complete the mission. The Crew: Mission Deep Sea is GeekDad Approved, and you can (and definitely should) get your copy today. At the start of every mission, a certain number of task cards will be dealt with depending on how difficult the mission is. The number of these cards varies based on their individual difficulty. So, there could be three easy and one medium difficulty task to complete or two very hard ones. This is how a round might look at its end. The Submarine card will win because it’s a trump card.