The Gang

• Designer: John Cooper and Kory Heath
• Publisher: Kosmos
• Players: 3-6
• Age: 10+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Round up your gang and get ready to pull off a series of bank heists using the power of poker! In The Gang, a co-operative version of Texas Hold’em, players bet on how good they think their hand of cards will be relative to the other players, then try to make their predictions a reality. Early in a round, without talking to each other, each player chooses a chip indicating how good they think their hand is. Then they begin dealing cards into the middle of the table and have a chance to reassess their hands as more cards are revealed. At the end of the round, players see whether they correctly evaluated their hand. If all players did, you get to open one of the bank vaults! If not, you trip the alarm! If you manage to open three vaults before you trip the alarm three times, your gang wins!

The Gang was a highly anticipated game at Gen Con 2024 – made more acute by the relative scarcity of the game; a small number of copies were being made available each morning, and this caused a mad rush each morning as people tried to make it to the stand in time to be in line for the game.

I was able to get one of these copies, and it quickly hit the table as I was gaming with a few gamers who love playing Poker!  You get a standard 52 card deck, but there are also Challenge cards and Specialist cards that can be added to the game.  There are four sets of chips: white, yellow, orange and red – used in rounds 1 to 4 respectively.

The goal of the game is to cooperatively rank the poker hands of the group in the correct order.  The task becomes more difficult because you are limited in the information that you are able to give to your teammates. 

In the basic game, you set out the chips on the table, going from one-star up to the number of players-star.  You will use all four colors as each round requires its own color.  In each round, you’ll essentially play a hand of Hold’Em poker.  If you’re familiar with that game, you’ll be quite comfortable with The Gang.

To start, the deck of poker cards is shuffled and each player is dealt two cards face down.  These are called their hole cards.  For the duration of the game, these cards remain secret.  Once everyone looks at their hole cards, players now can freely take a white Round 1 chip from the center of the table.  If you take the chip with one star on it, you are suggesting that you have the weakest hand.  Conversely, if you take the chip with the most stars on it, you suggest that you have the strongest hand.  All players can freely take chips at this time, either from the center of the table or from another player.  You can only take chips, you cannot place one in front of another player. Once everyone has a chip, the round ends.  As you only have 2 cards, you don’t even have a full hand at this point, so your chip choice is signifying potential hand strength.

In the next round, we get the flop.  Three cards are dealt face up from the deck into the center of the table.  These cards are considered to be in the hand of every player.  Essentially, the only difference in the hands are the two unknown facedown hole cards.  Now using the round 2 yellow chips, players again each take a chip to represent the strength of their hand.

In the 3rd round, a single card is added to the center of the table – commonly referred to as The Turn card.  Now using the orange chips, players take the one they feel represents where their own hand stands in the hierarchy of the group  As the team is ranking their hands, you cannot share specific information about their hand.  You are allowed to speculate on what other people have based on the public knowledge; but you cannot share anything that uses private info (i.e. your own hand).  

In the fourth and final round, the River card is dealt face up – now there are 5 cards face up on the table.  All players now make the best 5 card poker hand that they can between their hole cards and the face up cards.  Once they have determined what their hand is this round; the jockeying for poker chips happens one final time – using the red chips. 

Now it’s time for the big reveal – starting with whoever took the red 1-star chip reveals their hand.  Then, the red 2-star hand and so on.  Hopefully you will see a continuous progression of stronger and stronger poker hands. If you can get them all in the right order, the team has won the round, and you flip one of the vault cards over.  If you have made a mistake somewhere along the way, then flip an alarm card over.

The game is won if the team can flip 3 vault cards over before they flip 3 alarm cards over.

Once you are familiar with the standard game, you can make it more difficult by adding in the Specialist and the Challenge cards.  Each deck is ten cards in size and the cards are numbered – make sure that you keep them in order.  The first hand of the game is played without any special cards – but then based on the result of that first hand, you’ll bring a new card into play.  If the previous hand was successful, then the topmost challenge card is flipped up, and the rule on that card is in effect for the next hand.  If the previous hand was a failure, the top most specialist card is revealed and is in effect for the next hand.   At the end of each hand, place the revealed special card back on the bottom of its respective deck and draw a new one based on the current result.  The Challenge cards tend to make the game a bit higher while the specialist cards tend to make things a bit easier.

Alternatively you can play the Professional Mode which has a random Challenge card in effect for the whole game (along with the regular Challenge/Specialist card that comes up after each round).  And the Master Thief mode takes it to the the ultimate level where you have 2 challenge cards in effect for each hand, and no specialist cards are ever used.  At the end of each hand, discard the lowest numbered Challenge card and replace it with a new card from the deck.

My thoughts on the game

The chips are the main way to communicate there.  Let’s use a make believe example to show you the thought process here….  Say you started out with the 3 of spades and the 10 of spades as your hole cards.  Best case scenario might be a flush, but otherwise, a 10-3 is a pretty meh hand to start.  You might try to get the one or two star chip at that point.  Let’s say that the flop has 3 Hearts, 4 Spades, Jack Spades.  Well – now you’ve got a pair, and that’s at least something, but you have four out of five cards for a flush.   In my mind, that would move the hand up at least one notch.  

The Turn card is an 8 of clubs – this does nothing for your hand, and I’d probably grab the same chip or maybe one step lower at this point.  Don’t forget that players can grab chips from in front of you.  So… if you take a lower ranked chip quickly, you can hopefully convey the idea that the River card did not improve your hand in any way.  If someone felt more strongly about their own hand, they could always take that chip from you.

Finally, the River card is the Ace of Spades.  You end up with an Ace High flush.  This is a pretty strong hand, and I’d certainly be all for the highest chip in the final round.  Of course, you have to keep your deduction hat on during the whole game and see how the other players have ranked their own hand.  Realistically, a flush with a higher hole card than you is the only reasonable hand that could beat yours.  A full house, four of a kind or straight flush are impossible to make with the 5 face up cards.  Thus, the flush is the highest rank possible and makes the claim for highest hand very strong.

Every hand plays out differently, and you’ll have to watch which chip your teammates take each round to try to suss out what they have.  The one advantage (for me at least) is that unlike regular Poker, there is no element of bluffing.  You don’t have to try to figure out if someone’s bid is for real – as the game is cooperative, every move should represent the true nature of the hand in question.  The speed that someone takes a chip can also convey a lot of information (as I tried to illustrate in the example above).

The game gives you plenty of ways to modify the difficulty of the game, and your group may need to play a few games to figure out what the right modifications are.  You should note that the difficulty level does NOT scale for player count; the game is inherently easier with fewer players as you simply have fewer hands to place in order.  Thus, you might have to come up with a different set of difficulty additions based on player count.

The table can probably figure out some things as a group.  For instance if there is a pair in the flop and someone moves from one star to four stars; this is a pretty good indication of a three of a kind (or possibly a four of a kind) in play now.   We also find it helpful to discuss what the best possible hands are at any given moment based on the visible cards – the poker veterans in our group are quick to figure this out, and this information is only based on what is on the table, so it’s fair game. If everyone is familiar with poker, honestly there may not be a lot of discussion necessary – or this could be a way to increase the difficulty as all the teammates will have to come up with the same inferences based on the chips taken (and speed at which they are taken).    As the design team is also responsible for Zendo, this sort of game definitely seems to be in her wheelhouse. 

As you probably know, I’ve never been a big fan of limited communication games, but it doesn’t seem to be as much of an issue here.  Generally, in poker, there is zero communication so not being able to say anything about your own hand is the normal situation.   As a result, I’d actually not really call this a poker game or variant – without any bluffing, it’s just not poker (at least not to me)  Maybe it’s better to say that it’s a meld of Poker and The Mind?  It’s a clever game, and one that was quite fun in our first try.  A four player game without any special cards felt challenging (but we won!) – and a second game adding in the special cards definitely made it more interesting for me with a new rule being added for each round after the first.

There will be the inevitable comparison to the Crew – and to me, it kinda feels like apples and oranges.  In the Crew, you have to use clever game play to achieve the different objectives.  There is a bit more choice and player freedom to affect the way the hand turns out.  You may make decisions on what cards to play in order to let your teammates use their own cards in different ways.   In the Gang, the game unfolds in front of you.  You can’t affect the cards that you or anyone else has.  All you do is try to place the hands in the right order using a few limited communication tools.  You don’t have as many decisions to make during each hand, but you do have to do a bit more in trying to read their intentions – as you don’t get any other information from them (because they’re not playing any cards either!).  

Does that make one game better than the other?  For me, no.  They are just different games that use different skills.  I was able to explain the rules of The Gang to my poker veteran friends in five minutes and we had a great time.  This same group really struggled with The Crew because they aren’t versed in trick taking games (not even Spades or Euchre), and even the easiest missions there were too difficult for that group.  

I’m definitely looking forward to playing this more this year and learning what all the different Challenge and Specialist cards do to the game – and for now, my poker playing group also wants more!

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor