The Crew The Crew Screens Play

The Crew

THE CREW — five faces across a world map, with pinned photographs of skylines, a passport, a stack of notes, and a checklist reading recon, crew, gear, execute, get paid. Play now

Build a crew you trust. Take jobs around the world.
Choose your risks. Deal with the consequences.

$12 once, for life · nothing to install · build 150 · October 2026 · Windows, macOS and Linux

This is a game for a desk — 1280 across at the very least. Open this page on a computer.

The Crew

You are the commander. You start with a name, a passport and four empty places at the table.

People are looking for work, and every one of them has a trade, a history, a country that will or will not have them, and a price. Some are lying about all four. You read the files, you make offers, and you find out which was which later, usually at the worst possible hour.

Jobs come in from clients around the world — a recovery in Piraeus, an escort over a Polish pass, something in Osaka that nobody will put in writing. Each wants particular trades, particular languages and a particular amount of nerve. Each one expires. Spend three weeks thinking about it and a rival crew takes it while you think.

Then you send them, and it runs hour by hour, and something goes wrong. Something always goes wrong. What you do about it is the whole game: six ways out, none of them right, and the crew you spent a year building is the only thing standing between the plan and the police.

Money, heat and a ranking that other crews are climbing too. Nothing resets at the end of a week. People you cut loose remember that you cut them loose.

Black ink, white paper and a great deal of nerve, and no tutorial you can’t skip.

One week, and how it ends

Seven jobs on the board.
Five people with records.
One brief worth the heat — and a harbour café at 11:32, where it stops going to plan.

The jobs board: a crew strip of five faces, a list of postings with fees and required trades, and a world map with seven countries lit.
The board — seven postings, seven countries, and what each one is missing from your crew.
Green is a trade you have. Red is one you don’t.
The crew tab: four ID cards side by side, each with a drawn face, a flag, five attribute bars, schooling, years in jail and on the streets, languages, and buttons to pay a bonus, teach a trade or cut them loose.
Your crew — a file each.
Five attributes, what they know, what they speak, what they cost you a week, and what they’ll take off the top of every score.
A single job in Piraeus, Greece: a written brief, tags showing which requirements are met and missed, and six boxes reading fee 160K, crew needed 4, on the ground 1 week, expires week 63, difficulty, heat plus 15.
One posting, opened.
What the client wants, what it pays, how hot it runs, and how many weeks it stands there before somebody else takes it.
A job running live: a timestamped feed of events from 10:00 to 11:32, an ink drawing of the moment beside it — a man waiting at a harbour cafe table in Piraeus — and a red-bordered box headed The alarm goes early with six lettered options.
And then it goes wrong. Six ways out, no right answer, and a clock. Who you sent is the only thing that decides how it lands.

What it needs

System
Windows, macOS or Linux. It is one page of HTML with nothing underneath it, so the machine hardly matters.
Browser
Any current one — Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari.
Screen
1280 × 800 or wider. It is a game for a desk; there is no phone layout and there isn’t going to be one.
Graphics
Nothing in particular. It is type and line art. It will run on a laptop from 2014.
Installing
Nothing to install. No download, no unzipping, no security warning to click past, and nothing left on your disk that you have to find again later.
Internet
To load the page, and to stream the music. The game itself is one file — once it is open, everything it does it does on your machine.
Price
$12, once, paid before you play, taken by Stripe — which shows you whichever ways to pay it can offer where you are. No subscription, no second purchase, and no key to keep: it is your account that is paid for, so signing in is what opens the game, anywhere.

Where your game lives

Saving
It saves itself as you play and picks up where you left off. There is no save button and nothing to name. Close the tab whenever you like.
Where
In this browser first, and mirrored to your account so it is not only here. Nobody reads it but you — it goes up as one opaque blob.
What loses it
Nothing, while you are signed in — that is what the account is for. Clearing your browsing data empties this browser's copy, and the one on the account is still there to fetch back. A private window keeps nothing by design, and cannot hold a sign-in either, so the game will not open in one.
Carrying it
Sign in on the other machine; the dossiers are on the account and you fetch the one you want. The filing cabinet in the office (Esc, under the desk on the right) also writes the whole game out as a line of text — keep it anywhere, an email to yourself will do — which is the backup that depends on nothing but you.

Anything wrong with it

Bugs, a crew member who did something inexplicable, a screen that made no sense — say so, and say which build you were on (it is printed at the bottom of every screen in the game).
paz@playthecrew.com