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The Gang
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Description
Round up your gang and get ready to pull off a series of bank heists using the power of poker! In this innovative, cooperative version of a poker game, players bet on how good they think their hand of cards will be relative to the other players, and 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 in 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 if 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!
A classic game of poker with a cooperative twist
Fast rounds and high-stakes, gameplay is based on the poker variant, Texas Hold’em
Previous poker experience not required!
Perfect for fans of The Crew and other cooperative card games!
Quick play time and minimal game materials make for a great game to take on the go.
The Gang Show
Are you someone who’s fascinated by all the different winning combinations in Poker but are put off playing by the overly hostile nature of playing the game, to say nothing of the potential financial loss, well, The Gang is the game for you!
In what is decribed as a Cooperative Poker game (I know, right!) you work with your fellow players to estimate whose got the winning hand and who should have folded. All done without direct communication. This all comes together under the thematic veneer of robbing a vault, presumably where the other suckers who are playing for money end up donating their life savings, or getting caught in the act.
So how’s it all done?
Gang Way
The Gang is essentially a game of Texas Hold ’em but with everyone playing together instead of against one another. Don’t worry if you’ve never played Texas Hold ’em, it’s all explained here and everyone has handy reference cards. There’s no betting or bluffing or need of your celebrated poker face.
The Gang has four rounds. To start each player is dealt two cards, the pocket, which they keep secret. They must now estimate where they will finish at the end of the hand. There are a number of chips ranked from 1 up to the number of players in 4 colours for each of the rounds. In the first round the white chips are used and players take a chip and place it in front of them with the 1-star chip representing the weakest hand.
At this stage it’s largely guess work where you will end up unless you’ve been dealt a pair or some high value cards. There is no set order of play you just take a chip when you’ve made a decision. This can be from the pool or from another player if you think they’ve got the wrong value. You can put your chip back if you change your mind but you can’t put a chip in front of another player and you can’t have more than 1 chip in front of you. When everyone has a white chip we go to Round 2 “The Flop.”
Now things get a bit more interesting. Three cards are dealt out and you can mentally combine these with your Pocket to make actual final hands. Now you have a better idea of where you might end up in the ranking and choose an appropriate yellow chip. You can’t alter chips already placed but you certainly can improve or downgrade your previous guess. Also consider what the others are doing.
Round 3 “The Turn” sees another card dealt to the table and the Orange chips are now used in the same process. Finally, Round 4 “The River” sees 1 more card on the table and final guesses are made via the Red chips.
And now we have the final denouement. Starting from the lowest chip, hands are revealed and each must be better than the last. If they all are you unlock a vault card to reveal the gold. If not an alarm is sounded and you scarper.
That ends the first “heist” and you shuffle and deal and go again. If you, as a team, unlock 3 vaults everyone wins if you set off 3 alarms everyone loses. That’s pretty straightforward and you should be able to play in the specified 20 minutes.
The Gang’s All Here
That’s it for the basic The Gang and the only changing factor is that the ranking gets harder the more players there are. Three is quite easy as you usually know who’s top and who should have folded! But by the time you get to 6 the middle order positions can be very tricky so we are given a couple of means of adjustment: Challenge cards and Specialist cards. There are 10 of each.
The Challenge cards make life more difficult by messing about with the information you think you know whereas the Specialist cards generally allow you to share some information about your hands to other players. In normal play a Challenge card would get revealed after a successful heist and a Specialist after a failure although there are a number of further modes which add more to this.
By the way, let me mention whilst the Challenge cards have a nice graphical style the Specialist cards are works of art! They all combine representations of the appropriate character but done in the style of a Royal playing card. Superb
Gang Store Wrap
One final thought about The Gang, the presentation is tremendous: the cards, particularly the Specialists, the chips and even the box art are all top drawer. With it’s glittery box all in festive red and gold, compact size and accessible price point The Gang would make an excellent present, secret Santa or stocking filler. It’s not too complicated if the recipient is not a hardened gamer and it’s a quick, friendly multiplayer game as we come to the party season.
OMG a straight! That’s my top chip going down right away!
This is a hold up! No. wait. A Hold Em! A Texas Hold Em to be precise.
But this is not your usual poker style affair. There’s no tells to suss, no pistols to brandish, and arrival by horseback is most definitely optional. Why? Well, because we aren’t living in the wild west. But also this is poker co-operative style. Yes, you heard that correctly. The most competitive card game around has gone all care-bear and banded players together to bust open the vaults and share out the riches. And do you know what? It’s brilliant!
Although the main review for The Gang can be read here, I am coming to this game as a poker noob. Whilst I have played and enjoy games that use elements of poker in their game play (Pioneer Rails and Truffle Shuffle to name but a few), I don’t think I have ever (or at least I cannot recall ever having) played straight up poker. Even visiting Las Vegas in my younger days, the flops, flushes and rivers eluded me. And so, I went into The Gang with very few preconceptions of what a game of poker would feel like.
I honestly can’t tell you if it is a true poker style play, but I’ll explain a round very briefly so you poker pros can decide. You’ll have cards in your hand and a number of cards on show in a row (the flop) that is sort of like a lending library. You don’t collect the flop cards, but you can use them in combination with the cards in your hand to make specific melds which are ranked from low scoring (two of a kind i.e. a pair) to the highest run of picture cards in a single suit (a royal flush).
You’ll also have some chips (matching how many players there are) which you are going to take use to bet on how strong your melds are is compared to your teammates’. Now, you can chat about the flop and cards generally, but you aren’t allowed to reveal what is specifically in your hand – that would literally be giving the game away! So you need to give and gather information on what others have in a different way. The Chips! Ah hah!
By taking the lowest value chip, you are likely indicating that your own hand in combination with cards in the flop is quite weak. If you take the highest chip, then you’re suggesting the opposite – that you have something juicy forming. As cards get added to the flop, different colour /patterned chips are added, and the selecting/sorting process is repeated. When the 5th card has been added to the flop and the 4th set of chips divided up, it’s time to reveal everyone’s hands, starting with the player with the highest total on their chips. If the hand strength follows the order in which players reveal their cards, you win the round and flip over a vault card. If there’s a mismatch, the round is lost, and you flip an alarm card instead. So long as you can open the three vaults before you set off the three alarms, you and your teammates win The Gang!
Once you get into it, there are also advanced variants which increase or decrease the difficulty depending on whether you are winning rounds or losing them!
Final Thoughts!
If proper poker is as much fun as The Gang, I may be tempted to grab a saddle and ride into my local saloon looking for a game! Having said that, what I like most about it (and probably marks the major difference between The Gang and the game inspiring it) is that it involves the opposite of bluffing. And that’s good as I have the worst poker face in the world – Lady Gaga has nothing to fear from me! When we are playing, everything about the choices each player makes is to further your team efforts towards victory. As well as the chip shuffle between players who fancy their hands equally high or low, the hints and mentions of suits and flop composition are fully loaded. And if my eyebrows could speak, I definitely wouldn’t need my mouth haha! Arched brows and forehead crinkles are worth a thousand words! I’m not a fan of team games where you can’t speak at all – it feels like an unnecessary hand-tied-behind-your-back element. If you are working as a team, you should be able to explore and discuss options and strategy. And although you can’t reveal your cards to each other here, there is definitely value in the curated dialogue you can give.
Perhaps I like The Gang so much because it isn’t poker. Either way though, I think it’s super fun, and I can’t wait for me and my team to chip away at victory in the next game!
Zatu Score
You might like
- Poker without the pain
- Gold and glitter
- Quick to play
Might not like
- Playing as a team
- Keeping silent
- Not being able to use your poker face