TL;DR; Use the unminified version of crossroads.js, since you are doing a r.js build it will already compress the source file.
crossroads uses an unnamed define and is wrapped into a custom UMD (universal module definition). The minified version won't work well since r.js can't add the proper module name.
before minification:
(function(define){define(["signals"], ...
after minification:
(function(a){a(["signals"], ...
r.js can't figure out what a
means, it only looks for define
calls.