Mission Deep Sea is my preferred version of this amazing game, a few tiny changes and some interesting changes have both increased my enjoyment of our games and made it a more replayable game to have on our shelf.You will find a nearly identical rule set, the same linen finish on the cards, rich colors, and artwork that is very eye pleasing. One of our players discovered the number 6 card has an Orca on it, and that bit of artwork sealed the deal for them and made the game all the more enjoyable. If you haven't already played The Quest for Planet Nine you may still wonder what all this is about. The Crew is a "trick taking" game, which is just a fancy term for playing a card from your hand according to color when you can with the highest card number played winning that round and collecting the cards. The basic idea is that you'd play your hand of cards until they are all gone, however The Crew presents thematic missions via the logbook and task cards that will influence when, and how you will play the cards from your hand to achieve winning objectives. This is a play together, win together game, if one task is missed or incomplete you've lost that round and can reset and try again. The included logbook will walk you through starting off on very easy missions and progressing you into increasingly more difficult ones where new terms and complications exist to make play harder. This is both friendly to new players of trick taking games and serves well to ramp up the excitement at a reasonable pace so that everyone can get in sync with one another and how they play. This is also a game of limited communication so being in sync is important but since the basic rules are easy to grasp anyone can begin deep diving into the fun with just a few introductory plays.Here is what I like most about Mission Deep Sea as opposed to Quest for Planet Nine, the first thing is an elimination of one feature from the first game and that is the task tokens. Previously these were assigned to tasks and gave additional parameters for how and when they must be fulfilled, and while this did increase the difficulty of gameplay and works well, I'm happier with the task cards themselves in this version having difficulty settings printed on them directly and no longer having to use additional tokens on the table. A simple great game does not need extra parts and Mission Deep Sea ramped up the efficiency and enjoyment for me by how the task cards are now handled, on the backs are difficulty numbers set beside your player count. When attempting each mission you draw cards until you equal the suggested difficulty number for your player count, the same card that is easier at three players can be increasingly difficult at five players or vice versa depending on their varied conditions. With more than 90 of these task cards you can find a huge variety of combinations that make replayability of the game huge, if you've gone through the 32 missions in the logbook or just want to do your own created game you can set and decide a difficulty based on your players and set up your own missions with ease. One other really exciting if not stressful introduction to this version are timed missions, meant of course to be completed start to finish in a set time or you lose. These force a faster play speed than what most players may be initially comfortable with, but also are great for teaching players to be more intuitive of everything that is happening on the table and I helps with prediction skills. It is an unexpected thing to encounter when first going through the logbook of missions but we found it super exciting, you do however have the option of choosing a different modifier to the game if the timed version is not for you.Being familiar with the first game, we've poked around the logbook out of order to test different missions and see how they work; we've played the two player variant which I think is still amazing and works flawlessly and had up to four players so far total. The higher player interaction at larger player counts is fun but not necessary to enjoy the game. As of now we'll keep both versions of The Crew on our shelf, some friends may prefer the space theme of the first over the underwater theme of this one, I have a feeling though that we will stick to Mission Deep Sea as our version of choice for quite a while.