Crabs!

Welcome back friends. In order to try and catch up on our backlog, Amanda, Hector and I got in a quick game of Crabs!, one of the shorter games we’ve held in reserve in case our 31 games got backlogged. This is more or less a filler game so it will probably be a short review, but it was also new to us so I do have a few thoughts.

There isn’t much to say about the components. Crabs is a quick and dirty card game, so there are full sized cards, small cards and 5 tokens. The cards are decent but not great quality stock and the tokens are oversized meeple tokens, which do a good job at what they’re supposed to do. The art is an over the top cartoony sort of thing, neither particularly amazing, but not poor either.

The game is about the collection and sale of crabs. Players can upgrade their gear, draw cards, trade crabs with the crab pool, capture crabs (either stressed or unstressed), de-stress crabs and sell crabs, with only calm crabs being able to be sold. The goal is to get the most points by filling crab orders, selling premium crabs and upgrading gear. It’s a pretty simple game, honestly there is not a whole lot to differentiate it from a dozen other filler card games.

There’s not a whole lot of theme going on here, but there really doesn’t have to be. The cartoony cards make interesting what is really a game about numbers. You could make it about collecting samurai to send to battle and it really wouldn’t make much of a difference. That being said, it’s decent at what it does, which is to kill a little time. The rulebook is like 10 pages and you can teach the game in 5 minutes. It’s simple, not amazingly fun but better than doing nothing while waiting for a spot at a longer game.

I wouldn’t recommend playing it 2 player, and probably won’t again. The communal pool of crabs doesn’t really change much with only two players, so it largely ends up being players just drawing cards of the top of the deck for until they get what cards they need, making it an extremely luck based game. With more players the game wouldn’t last much longer, but would give the players more options to trade crabs with the communal pool, allowing for a bit more strategy.

At the end of the day, this is possibly one of the most pointless reviews I will ever write, because while I might recommend this as a quick filler game to stick in your pocket, especially in a family or casual setting, it’s not available anywhere. I got my copy from kickstarter and trying to order a copy from the publisher’s page leads to a dead link. If you can find it used for a few bucks and need a quick filler, go for it, but it’s certainly not worth hunting down.

Note: This makes you do math. I don’t like math. 10/10 would not play 2 player again.

The Teal Deer

Game: Crabs!
Designer: shane007 (sic)
Price: Not available. It was $16 on kickstarter.
Players: 2-5
2 player Scaling: Not great, would be a good filler for 4 or more
Playtime: 5-10 minutes per player.
Estimated Lifespan: Forever, but only because it has collectable value.
Average Play Frequency: Annually, if that
Complexity: 2
Components: 2.5
Bang for Buck: 4.5
Value for Time: 4
Fun Factor: 2.5
Overall: 2.5