The Crew - The Quest For Planet Nine is a co-operative trick taking game where you play a group of astronauts set on finding the mysterious Planet Nine. The game takes place over a long campaign of 50 missions, each of which is harder than the previous. For each mission, one or more crew members is assigned a task they must complete, which is represented in the game by taking a trick. To make matters more complicated, tricks sometimes have to be completed in a certain order.
The Crew is a game that’s big on strategy and replay, but which comes in a delightfully small package. Game components are simple: a custom bridge-sized deck, a mini deck, a few chits and a mini booklet that describes each mission. It’s the perfect game for travel and easily fits in a photobox.
The Insert
This is another feather-weight insert, using only 14 total grams of filament for the two pieces: the organizer and the token holder. The organizer holds the two decks of cards, the large circular token and the rocketship token. I’ve made the card bins big enough to accomodate sleeved cards, and I’ve iterated on the design some more to make the cards easier to pull out. Each card bin has a finger pull area. The “keepers” that hold the cards in the bin have been filleted to reduce filament usage even more. The token holder holds the mission tokens and communication tokens.
Is all this extra work really necessary? Probably not, but as I create each design, I strive to improve the design language with a goal of maximizing function while minimizing resource usage, and hopefully ending with a pleasing form along the way. If I have the gumption at some point in the future, I will revisit early designs and update them with lessons learned from each iteration.
The organizer can optionally be glued in with a little bit of superglue, tacked in place with hot glue or with a couple dabs of clear silicone sealant. But if you don’t want to bother, it holds in place via friction pretty well, at least if you’re using the Novelinks 4 x 6 Photo Case. There are plenty of other similar cases out there, but you may have to slightly tweak the scale if you use one of those.
The token holder pulls out separately from the organizer so you can access the tokens during the game and there’s even ample room left over for a pen/pencil and a small notepad to keep track of your missions.
Print Times
Like with most of my functional organizers, draft mode is all that’s required. And this print in particular benefits from a bigger nozzle. Just upgrading from 0.4mm to 0.6mm practically cuts print time in half. The chart below is print time on a Prusa MK3S for BOTH pieces.
| Nozzle Size | Layer Height | Print Time |
|---|---|---|
| 0.4mm | 0.3mm | 1 hr 8 min |
| 0.6mm | 0.4mm | 36 min |
| 0.8mm | 0.55mm | 35 min |
Downloads
| Item | Download Link | |||
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This work is released under the CC-BY-NC-ND-4 International License
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