Family•Reviews

Jamaica The Crew Expansion Review

We’re taking a look at The Crew, an expansion for the pirate racing game Jamaica

This is an expansion and must be played with the base game Jamaica.
Read our full review of the game or watch our overview on Instagram!

What The Crew Adds

This expansion adds a set of 20 characters that each have a unique power. Players are now able to recruit these characters when they pay the Harbor fee when traveling around the island.

These Crew members are hired and welcomed aboard your ship, taking up a space on your ship just like any other resource.

The Crew expansion also adds new treasure cards, including a 12 point treasure card which must be visible to all players.

What Do We Think?

The Crew Expansion adds some interesting new elements to Jamaica. Finding ways to recruit Crew members to your ship so that they are the most helpful to you, while also not sacrificing too many of your cargo spaces is a fun bit of strategy.

Some of the Crew members seem more beneficial than others. A lot of this comes down to some Crew members not being helpful during either the beginning or end of the game. So being able to recruit them at the right time and get rid of them when they’re no longer helpful is a balance players will have to find.

The Crew members are selected in a bit of a strange way based on their location to the rum bottle. Player can move the rum bottle around to allow different crew members to become available for purchase, but mostly we find this to be a bit extra. We wish that new characters were revealed each time a player visited a port, and those not selected were left available for the next player to dock at a port.

Beyond the strategy, we really liked how the crew members made visiting the ports a good thing to do. Before, it was just bad. You had to pay gold and received nothing for your trouble. Now visiting the ports is an active part of your strategy.

That said, The Crew does increase play time and we feel that Jamaica is best when played quickly.

The Crew expansion is our family’s preferred way to play Jamaica.

However, we would choose to not play The Crew with new players, opting for a faster paced game with the base game. If purchasing the new edition, it all fits nicely inside the new edition base game box insert which was made with the expansion in mind.

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A special thank you to our friends at Asmodee for sending a copy of The Crew for review.
As always, our thoughts and opinions are our own.

Game Info:
Title: Jamaica: The Crew
Designer: Malcolm Braff, Bruno Cathala, Sebastien Paucho
Artist: Mathieu Leyssenne
Publisher: Space Cowboys