I admit I was pretty skeptical when I heard about The Gang, a new small-box game that was described to me as “cooperative poker.” It is that, but it works far better than I expected it to.
The Gang is based specifically on Texas Hold ‘Em, where players begin with two cards in their hand (pocket cards) that other players can’t see, and then five cards are revealed in three stages, first three (the flop), then one more (the turn), and then the last one (the river). In actual poker, players bet after each of these stages, but nothing is resolved until after all five cards are out and the betting has concluded. In the Gang, the players try to determine the ranking of all players’ best hands, best to worst, after the river card is flipped, but must not communicate at all about what’s in their hands. The only communication comes by taking the ranking tokens after each step – so, for example, if after the flop, your best hand is nine-high (which is terrible), you would probably grab the one-star token for that round, which is the lowest one. Someone else might try to take it as well, so you have to decide whether to let them have it or whether to swipe it from them as a way of signalling that, hey, your hand really sucks. You can never have more than one of those ranking tokens in front of you, and you can’t put a token in front of someone else – only in front of yourself or back to the middle of the table.
There are four sets of those tokens, one set for each stage, but you only ‘score’ the set for after the river. If all players have the correct ranking tokens based on their best possible hand, your team has completed the challenge and gets to flip a heist card; if any player is out of ranking order, you have triggered the alarm and flip one of those cards instead. You all play a best-of-five, so if you get three heist cards before you trigger three alarms, you win the game.
The game also comes with various cards to increase the difficulty or change some of the rules, like giving each player a specific power or requiring you to win in four rather than five. I understand why these exist, since otherwise the entire game is a regular deck of playing cards and the 16 tokens, but I don’t think it needs them. It just overcomplicates things without making the game any more interesting. I might feel better if I played this a few dozen times and maybe got tired of it, but there are just so many possible combinations from a deck of 52 cards that I think it’s got a lot of legs.
The one caveat I would offer is one the tutorial app acknowledges – the game plays 3 to 6, but with only 3 players, it’s just not that challenging. There are only six possible configurations of tokens/rankings with three players, so you could accidentally get it right now and then, and that takes a good bit of the fun away. I played with 4 and 5 and it was appropriately difficult, winnable but not easily so, and that meant that when we nailed it, everyone got that positive feeling from a job well done. We had one people where we had three people whose hands were separated by just four cards – something like queen high, jack high, nine high – and we got it right. That was incredibly satisfying. The group had a 12-year-old and an 8-year-old, and both were able to grasp the concept and the scoring with the help of the reference cards (which just shows the hierarchy of the values of possible hands), although the 8-year-old struggled a little bit with the nuance of being, say, second-highest – if he saw he had a good hand, he wanted the top token. I imagine that will smooth out with more plays.
Speak Your Mind