Earlier this week, our group got together to play a tabletop card game called You’ve Got Crabs. Here is a short description and evaluation of the game through our experience.
The playing field has “sides” that are composed of two players on opposing teams as teammates sit diagonally from each other. Each player has four cards in hand at all times. Gameplay consists of each side alternating turns where players on that side can choose to swap out the card(s) in their hands with any of the four cards that are in the “Ocean”, which are placed in the middle of the table. The main objective of the game is to try and get a hand of four of the same cards (i.e. four Ab Crab cards– yes, all the cards are crab puns) and non-vocally signal to your partner that you’ve reached a hand of four of the same. Another main component of the game (and what actually determines the winners!) are “crab points”. Crab points can be won (or lost/stolen) in many ways— and everyone starts with two. If you have a hand of four of the same and your partner points at you and says “You’ve Got Crabs”, then you guys get to get a crab out of the “crab pot” (which starts with 8 crabs at the beginning of the game). If an opposing player points at you and says “You’ve Got Crabs”, then they get to steal a point from you or your partner (you and your partner share points— so who they steal from doesn’t really matter). If you guys are broke, then they can just steal from the crab pot. Same goes for you and your partner if you accuse an opposing player for having crabs and they do, you can steal from them. But, be aware, if anyone— partner or not— accuses you of having crabs and you don’t, then that team loses a point to the crab pot. Also, once a player gets outed for having four of a card, they can discard their cards and pull four new ones from the draw pile.
As mentioned earlier, turns are by side and not individual players (which also means this game can only be played with an even number of people). So a pair of players should be playing at any given time. How side turns end are when both players set their cards face-down to signal that they are done swapping and then they turn the Crabbing License (which has a very happy crab-dude pointing up) towards the next side’s turn. If two sides go without swapping anything with the four face-up cards in the Ocean, then those cards can be discarded (face-down) and replaced with four more cards from the draw pile. To decide which side goes first at the beginning of the game can be determined by the players (the rulebook gave the example of the side with a player that “has the coolest birthmark”). Actions include the following: swapping a card from your hand with one from the Ocean (so setting a card down and picking one up), placing cards face-down on the table, turning the Crabbing License at the end of a side’s turn, in some cases counting down from three to signal a side’s start (if you really wanted each player on that side to have equal time to swap), grabbing crab points (either from another team or the crab pot), and doing a non-vocal signal(s) to your partner (determined by each other at beginning of game). As mentioned before, the method to score points is either through noticing your teammate’s signal when they have four of a kind or by noticing the other team. One thing that came apparent rather quickly however, was the ease of counting cards for the other team. While the game tries to promote information on someone’s cards as a secret and the player’s secret signals as the main method, there were countless points scored the moment someone added a card. Instead of watching the other player’s body movements and trying to determine a sign, it was far easier to just memorize how many of a card type they had. However, counting cards really makes for a less satisfying solution, as opposed to watching for signals where there’s a lot more doubt and uncertainty in the opposing players, but who then feel more rewarded when they are correct in guessing. Having played a similar game (the card game Kemp), one flaw in the execution of You’ve Got Crabs is that player turns are too slow, allowing for less chaos or rather providing players too much time to simply watch and count cards while it’s not their turn. A simple fix is just having all four players able to draw and discard from the central pile at a time, thereby forcing the player to focus on quickly having to draw (as there are now more hands competing to grab the same card) and less attention to just watch the other players.
This leads me on to our second gripe with You’ve Got Crabs and it’s that the game overall feels a little childish, in the sense that it seems to treat the players as less capable than they truly are. Some of these choices in mechanics limit the players and make the game overall feel very slow and basic (in comparison to the other “four-of-a-kind” games we have played such as Spoons or Kemp) and after only scoring half the points in the game it felt like things were just dragging on. When the mechanics are too easy to exploit by paying attention, and the turns are too slow based, it ultimately leads to minimal difficulty, and therefore the game’s pace and win condition felt far too long, and more as a restriction, forcing us to continue playing. It feels more evident to me considering much of the actual enjoyment we got from the game was from humor, and not what is directly part of the game but just by playing it in a group. Additionally, we would add that the scoring in our game was very one-sided, as only one player in our group was card counting at first and therefore his team was able to score nearly all the points in the beginning.
While not traditional in terms of resource management, there is a level of strategy to the way you accumulate cards when considering the main strategy for opposing players is the counting of cards. For instance, you can choose to mess other players up by trading an almost perfect hand for the random cards in the middle. This is an interesting strategy that we noticed during gameplay, and complicated the simple game to the point that it theoretically could have put us in a deadlock. The same thing would happen if two players each had half of the total number of a certain card, both trying to accumulate that fourth card which would be impossible. This is definitely a flaw that prolonged gameplay. There’s also a strategy to the way you accumulate like cards while remaining under the radar, such as gathering different cards in order to confuse players as to which type of card you’re targeting. In this way, the crab cards serve as a sort of “resource”, and their circulation serves as the “economics”.
The rulebook was a small pamphlet that was very neatly organized and contained all of the rules and details of the game. It started with setup (setting up Ocean, handing out cards, how the game setup is different for four players versus six, etc) and then went on to explain the mechanics of gameplay (swapping cards, replacing Ocean, accusing players, etc). It also included a few “last-minute points”, if you will, on more details of the game that seemed to answer all of our questions. There was only one real ambiguity of the game and that was on the accusations rules. Here are some questions on that ambiguity we had after our gameplay: “When accusing others, how to decide who said what first?, “If someone starts to say it but someone else says it quicker, do they get the point?”, and “If someone says just ‘crabs’ does that count, or does it have to be the whole phrase ‘You’ve got Crabs’?”. The game progresses as players finish swapping cards, switching the turn to the next player. The game moves towards its end as players call “You’ve got crabs!”, and accumulate, steal, and lose points. The game ends when all the points from the middle are taken.
The rules were relatively simple, and the game pieces were not overwhelming. In this way, knowing what to do was clear at the beginning of game play. There was even a piece that indicated which turn we were on, so it was simple to look down and see whether or not it was your turn or not. The point system was also self-explanatory (the team with the most crabs wins!). It was also clear that there was some player autonomy in moving the game forward; in other words, if no one chose to yell “You’ve got crabs!”, then the game would not progress. In this way, if players for some reason did not get a hold of that mechanic, knowing what to do and how to progress would not be as clear.
The game naturally promotes a lot of manipulation via actions as part of the rules. Considering you have multiple players actively watching your every move, literally searching for a secret signal, everyone is conscious of any action outside the ordinary. If a player was to stand up, for example, it would immediately draw a lot of attention, and the more extreme an action is, the more attention it gathers, which equally makes it very ridiculous as it’s clearly not a secret signal (nor the actual signal). The actual drawing and discarding of cards are also rather entertaining in themselves–there were times when someone would discard 3 of a kind or even 4 of a kind. But really the game was filled with a lot of unrelated chatter, because as we mentioned before, it’s very slow-paced, with not enough urgency in the player’s actions. Additionally there is the natural competition with the player next to you to draw the cards from the middle, but with only one other person the odds of overlap are still low. Competition also plays in with the implementation of the point-stealing mechanic, which also provides motivation to call other players out. But even combined, we still felt the lack of urgency, that ultimately kept the game rather casual and conversational in our playthrough.
Group Members: Giorgio, Ren, Riya, Spencer, Will
