Base price: $34.
2 – 6 players.
Play time: 20 – 45 minutes.
BGG Link
Check it out on Kickstarter!
Logged plays: 1
Full disclosure: A preview copy of Crash & Grab was provided by Pull the Pin Games. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game.
Alright, another week, another pair of reviews coming in right under the wire. I actually am a week ahead on photography right now, so I look forward to seeing how I waste that head start. I have some other stuff coming up this week so I might need to focus up on that stuff in the near future. We will see. Work, life, balance; we do try to have it all. In the meantime, though, we’re back to a particularly fun time of year: Kickstarter season. So you’ll see a few crowdfunded games a month getting previewed here on What’s Eric Playing. Are you excited? You should be. There’s some great stuff coming (and great stuff here now). Let’s get into it!
In Crash & Grab, your alien adventure has come to a bit of an abrupt stop. Your ship crashed and you escaped, but the rest of your crew is scattered to the winds. Unfortunately, you’re not the only crash survivor on this planet, and everyone’s come to the same awkward conclusion. Your ships work mostly the same, so it probably doesn’t matter who you pick up as long as they have the right specialization. So smack into your opponents to steal enough crew to escape this nightmare rock before it’s too late! Can you crew your ship in time?
Contents
Setup
You’ll start by setting up the Map Tiles based on your player count:
It’s always going to be a square; it’ll just be a bigger square at five or six players. Then, place Direction Markers on each edge of the board to point in the given direction (it doesn’t matter which goes where).
Place the Energy and Boosters nearby, and give each player an Energy:
Set the Rotation Die, the Placement Die, and the Starting Player Probe nearby:
Each player should take a player color Saucer:
They each come with four Crew; place them in any order with the pilots (vaguely diamond-shaped) in the front:
Give each player a Saucer Mat; the Override Tokens can be set aside for later. In two-player games, each player takes two Saucers and sets them and their crew up accordingly.
Give each player a set of Movement Cards:
And shuffle the Upgrades, making a nearby pile:
You’re about done! Place your Saucers by rolling the Placement Die and placing your Saucer on the corresponding number. If there’s someone there already increment the number by 1 and try again (12 rolls around to 1). Now, determine who goes first. The player to their right (except in a three-player game) takes a Booster. Any player who is not the first player and did not get a Booster places their pilot on the board following the same procedure as placing Saucers. You should be ready to start!
Gameplay
Crash & Grab! You win as soon as you fill your ship with crew, regardless of color. That said, you can steal crew that doesn’t match from your opponents; good luck!
To start a round, each player picks a movement card and a direction, and then places that card in the notch of their Saucer Mat. The notched direction is where you’ll move; the card is how much. Then, everyone reveals! Starting with the start player (who rolls the Rotation Die to determine turn order), each player moves the amount indicated (gaining a Booster or an Energy if the Movement Card selected says to). At 5+ players, the players going fifth or sixth gain an Override Token and can change their Movement to the direction of their choice when their turn starts.
If you run into an Accelerator, you can turn and move your original movement again in the direction of your choice! You can do the same thing with a Booster once you end your movement. If you move over a Crewmember, you immediately beam them aboard without stopping!
If you bump into another player, that’s another thing entirely. You take their space and send them moving in your original direction your full original movement amount. If they hit an Accelerator, they keep going in the same direction, but they start with the original movement amount again! It’s a great way to get someone away from you.
Inevitably, you might end up off the board. If you crashed yourself, you give a crewmember (not in your color) to the player of your choice with the fewest crewmembers. Very kind. If someone else crashes you on their turn, they can steal one from you (if you have more crewmembers than they do) or gain an Energy! Worth noting that if you’re off the board when you’d take your turn, you place your ship following Placement Die rules and then choose a direction to execute your movement in.
At the end of your turn, if you picked up a Crewmember, you must place a new one of your choice using the standard Placement Die rules. Additionally, if you have 2+ Energy, you can spend 2 to purchase an Upgrade! That will give you a useful new ability.
Once everyone’s taken a turn, the round ends! The Starting Player Probe passes to the player closest to the Start Player with the fewest crewmembers. Also, place crashed saucers following the standard Placement Die rules.
Play continues until one player gets four different types of crew on their ship! They immediately win, even if they crash in the process!
Player Count Differences
The primary differences as player count increases are chaos and scale. With more players, there are going to be many more opportunities to pick up crew and crash into your opponents and send them flying off the stage to their doom. Unfortunately for you, the same is pretty true in reverse. You’ll see a lot of players suddenly having eyes for you at higher player counts, especially if you’re close to winning or you have any free crew they can pilfer. You may want to stay away from the edges with more players, but thankfully, the play area is significantly larger, so there’s only so far that you can be reasonably knocked away by someone. There are Upgrades that can change that calculus, however, so keep an eye out for those. Ironically, since you use two sets of saucers at two players, the player count with the fewest ships on the board is actually three players. It’s still pretty chaotic, but it only gets more so from there. I’d say let that be a guideline for your preferred player count. I don’t have a strong preference, though; the chaos is part of the game.
Strategy
- Upgrades let you specialize skills; that’s pretty useful. You can get a lot of useful tricks from Upgrades; if you have nothing else to do, get energy!
- Getting more of your crew onto the board is a good thing, since then you can lock them in. If you steal them from someone else or pick them up they cannot be taken from you, which is great. Try to get your crew as fast as possible, even if it means taking someone else’s so you get to choose who gets placed next.
- It’s never a bad idea to crash someone if you have nothing else to do. It gets you an energy, if nothing else; if they have any crew you can take, you can also snatch those guys up to keep as a buffer against someone else robbing you or you crashing yourself.
- Accelerators let you make sharp turns, which can be pretty cool if you want to get somewhere or specifically don’t want to be where you were. You can move pretty far away on a turn if you plan ahead!
- You can chain up crashes using other players and Accelerators. If you hit a player into an Accelerator causing them to crash into another player who ends up in an Accelerator, you understand how you can quickly launch someone entirely into next week. And you still get to rob them! So that’s two things.
- Boosters are also a lot of fun. You can use them to essentially hard-pivot in any direction. Chaining them with Accelerators can let you pretty quickly pick up a crewmember in a neat sequence of steps.
- Crashing yourself is also a valid strategy. Sometimes you need to go fast, no matter the consequences. If that happens, you can always move 5, go into an Accelerator, move 5 more, and in all likelihood completely launch yourself off the board. If you grab your last crew while doing so, you still win. It’s worth a shot!
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- High chaos. There’s people crashing into each other and zipping all over the board to grab stuff and I think one Upgrade lets you change around the boards themselves? There’s a lot of chaos to go around, so if that’s your thing (and it’s usually my thing for these kinds of games), it’s well-executed here.
- The art style is goofy and fun. It works for the genre and game, I think; it’s a solid pairing.
- I appreciate that there’s special places where all the player-specific tokens go on teardown. Each player color has a little box where their crew and saucer go, which is nice. Then the box itself has a guide on the inside showing where to place everything, which is even nicer.
- I get that it’s a company thing, but I think having to pull a pin to open the box is goofy and charming. It’s a commitment to a bit and an aesthetic, and I usually find that you have to respect that.
- Less complex than I was expecting from the pieces, which is nice. It’s essentially bumper cars with upgrades and a bit of theft, which is excellent. The movement rules are only made complex by the number of different places you can stop and pivot and boost again.
- I like that the board changes size to accommodate more players. It’s not only necessary, it’s also fun!
- I still think that the Upgrade pathway being the primary lever the game uses to make the game move faster is very smart. By the end of the game, you’ll have so much control over your movement or actions or what have you (if you played your Upgrades right) that you can usually grab a crewmember or steal one or move in such a way that you can push someone off the board or something pretty easily, which makes the game naturally move towards its intended conclusion. It’s smart game design and makes the game feel like you’re progressing towards something, which is always nice.
Mehs
- I’d kind of expected to see some catch-up benefit to crashing, but there doesn’t seem to be one, even if someone else crashes your ship before you get to take your turn. I assume part of this is not incentivizing players to crash themselves, but the best that you really get out of the deal is that if you’re off the board when your turn starts you get to choose what direction you move in after you’re re-placed randomly on the board. It’s not terrible, since you might get better placement than you had before you were, uh, “removed”, but you don’t see a noticable gain.
Cons
- There’s some potential for dogpiling, though ideally the action selection should ward that off a bit if players aren’t actively coordinating. I really don’t like dogpiling in games, and that will almost certainly happen to the first player to get close to the victory condition. I usually call that “getting Munchkin’d”, for the eponymous game, but it does happen a lot here. Ideally, it’s harder to coordinate if the round order die doesn’t work in your favor, but there’s only so much you can do if everyone’s against you. Notably, one silver lining is that you can’t dogpile players with fewer crew than you (you can only steal from players with more), but you still risk that Munchkin Effect close to victory.
Overall: 7.75 / 10
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by Crash & Grab! It has a bit of action programming to it, which can be risky, but only in the loosest sense possible. You pick a direction and then whatever happens, happens. I kind of love that, since it allows for a lot of high-chaos play. It can also occasionally lead to players ganging up on other players, which I don’t love, so I was a bit surprised to see there was no benefit for players who crashed on their previous turn (unless you got a very specific Upgrade). Oh well. There’s a lot of chaos to the game, but one incredibly smart design choice at the center that balances it all out, and that’s the steady pace of player progression. Every few rounds, players will acquire enough Energy to purchase Upgrades that bend the rules of the game a bit more and more in their favor. As they do, it becomes easier for them to get the things that they need to win, so the game cannot go on indefinitely, no matter how chaotically you play. It’s wise and well-implemented. It’s also good that you can’t lose crewmembers of your color; another technique to make sure the game doesn’t run long. Beyond that, though, there’s a lot to enjoy with play that scales up to six players and a lot of crashing and stealing and zany chaos to make for a silly addition to any game night that’s still got a good underpinning of strategic play. I was impressed by Crash & Grab, and if you like a fair balance of strategy and chaos, you love stealing from your friends, or you just want to create a situation in which your best move is to zoom off the board to your death, you’ll probably enjoy it too!
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