Base price: $15.
3 – 6 players.
Play time: ~20 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 9
Full disclosure: A review copy of The Gang was provided by KOSMOS.
I love writing reviews in strange places. Currently, I’m watching my friend get a bunch of her hair shaved off while I write. Why not? Sometimes friends need emotional support and the hustle and bustle of a hair salon is a great place to get some focused writing done. And here I am! I’m writing about some new games that I’ve been meaning to get to. Small games, big games; every kind of game. Our next game is coming from KOSMOS. Excited about The Crew? Want to change up your game? Well, let’s check out The Gang!
In The Gang, players are in a high-stakes heist situation. Gotta break into the vault, get the money, and get out. How are you going to do this? With a little bit of one of the most classic casino games of all time: Texas Hold ‘Em. Except this time, you’re not just playing to win: you’re playing together to make sure that your hands are set up for the big wins and the big losses. Order your cards, plan ahead, and execute if you want to set up with the big score. Will you be able to finally beat the house?
Contents
Setup
Set out the three alarm cards and the three vault cards:
Set out the chips; use one per player of each color:
If you want to use them, you can order the Penalty and Bonus Cards and set their stacks near the other cards:
Shuffle the rest of the cards and make a deck, then deal each player two pocket cards. You should be ready to start! Set out the white chips to begin the first round.
Gameplay
A game of The Gang is simple: win three rounds before you lose three rounds! The challenge is that each round is a cooperative game for Texas Hold ‘Em. Your goal? Correctly order your final five-card hands by quality.
In the first round, each player goes off the strength of their pocket two cards. The player who thinks they have the best hand takes the white chip with the fewest stars, and the player who thinks they have the worst hand takes the white chip with the most stars. The problem is: you can’t talk about what cards you have!
Once everyone’s taken a white chip, the first round ends. Set out the yellow chips and reveal three cards off the deck to form The Flop. Now, everyone can make a five-card hand from their two pocket cards and the three cards in the center. Use the Hand Ranking Card to determine how good your hand is, and then sort the chips among the players as you did in the first round.
Next round, reveal one more card (The Turn) and set out the orange chips. Now there’s an extra card, so all players must form their best five card hand (again, no talking about cards or revealing your pocket cards!). Each player picks a chip and then you move on.
Final round! The red chips are set out and the final card, The River, is revealed! Now is the moment of truth. Your final ordering of cards must be correct. The player with the worst overall hand must have the chip with the most stars, and the player with the best overall hand must have the chip with the fewest stars. If players have the same hand of five cards, then their ordering doesn’t matter. Starting with the player with the most red stars on their chip, players reveal their hand and state their Hand Ranking. If they’re all correct, you win the round! Flip a Vault Card. If not, flip an Alarm Card. Then take all the cards and start again!
If you flip three Vault Cards, you win! Otherwise, you lose!
To spice things up, you can flip a Bonus when you flip an Alarm to make the game easier, or a Penalty when you flip a Vault to make the game harder.
Player Count Differences
This one’s pretty varied, based on how many players you’ve got. The primary thing that varies, though, is going to be the difficulty of the game. Careful with that one. With three players, coming up with an ordering is not necessarily as difficult as you’d potentially expect; you just need to find the high, the low, and the in-between. When you hit five or six, though, suddenly, it becomes a lot harder to determine who goes where! Determining third, fourth, or fifth placement is tricky, especially because players aren’t necessarily reliable judges of what the rank of their hand is going to be relative to other players. I’ve seen plenty of players think their two pair is the worst or second-worst hand (and yet, it’s the best), for instance. So as the player count increases, you’ll start seeing that challenge. That said, this is a great way to increase the difficulty of a game if you’re looking to do so! If you want an easier time (or it’s your first game), try starting with three players. I still have fun at any player count, though.
Strategy
- Keep in mind that every hand is not equally as likely as every other hand. A two pair is actually a pretty good hand! I keep reminding people of that. It’s helpful to keep in mind that certain hands aren’t all of equal likelihood.
- Don’t undervalue your hand! If you’ve got even a decent hand, there’s a reasonable chance that other players just have high cards or something functionally worthless. Even a pair can sometimes be a winner. Naturally, if you have a straight or a flush or something, you should lead the pack.
- Communicate as much as you’re allowed to. A quick grab of the high chip or the low chip can be pretty helpful, especially if you then aren’t quite as keen in the next round. A high pocket pair or something can be a great early hand, but it might get progressively less useful if the subsequent cards aren’t in your favorite.
- Losing a hand isn’t terrible; it gives you information about how your fellow players play. Now you know how players value their hands or what they think are low or high-value hands. Plus, you have a few opportunities to lose a hand without losing the game. If you’re also playing with alarm-based benefits, you can get a bonus for losing the round to make the next round easier.
- Take some time to process how willing or resistant players are to give you their chip; it can imply their confidence. If you want another player’s chip, you can just ask them for it. If they don’t want to give it to you, that usually means that they’re pretty confident about their placement, so you can potentially try to make your case to them. If you’ve got a particularly good or particularly bad hand, you may need to flex a bit more.
- The first round doesn’t really matter (unless it does). It can be pretty helpful if you’ve got a good pocket, but if you don’t have consistent cards, it can be a whole lot of nothing in the first round. Generally, I recommend going for the low-star chip if you have at least one face card or something in the pocket.
- Sometimes it can be extremely hard to differentiate between two hands. That’s okay when that happens. Sometimes it means you have the same hand, so your ordering doesn’t matter. Other times, it means you might mess up and lose the round, but that’s just … life, sometimes. Use your bonus cards where you can or try to determine who’s got the better hand.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- I’m really enjoying these “cooperative spins on classic games”. It’s a whole thing, kind of like how Balatro and Slay the Spire started a bit of the “roguelikes of everything” genre. It’s nice to get to play some games that are still pretty consistent with things I know but also cooperative. Just generally a fan of those.
- Plays very quickly. It’s going to be three poker hands, at least, but they move pretty quickly. You can get through it fast. It helps that the rounds are pretty short overall.
- The poker chips are nicer than I expected for a $15 game. They’re not clays, granted, but they’re a pretty solid plastic and I wasn’t expecting that. It’s a nice and surprising quality piece for the game.
- I enjoy that there are ways to make the game easier and more difficult based on whether or not you win or lose rounds. I really generally like games that allow for small adjustments to the difficulty, either up or down. It lets players make the game an appropriate challenge for their group, rather than just the same difficulty every time.
- The card art is fun! Very art deco-meets-heist vibes. I particularly love the face cards and the bonus cards. Really gives off the feeling that everyone’s part of this heist.
- It’s important, but the cards shuffle nicely. They’re pretty good! I was very impressed. If you’re going to be shuffling cards a lot, the cards should shuffle well!
- Another pretty portable game. It’s a relatively small box, which is nice. I have a few boxes of this size where the games kind of all fit together and I just take them everywhere. You can probably place them in some kind of transport box and make it all work if you want to take the game somewhere. The box is a bit easy to scratch.
- I’d love to see how this could be expanded or updated with missions or challenges! Some extra types of setups or types of poker challenges could be a fun way to mix it up.
Mehs
- Not much to be done about it, but the Hand Ranking Card does inadvertently imply to players unfamiliar with poker that every hand has about the same likelihood of appearing. I keep seeing it happen every game. There’s a certain amount of accidental implication inherent to the card, since everything is the same size and same spacing apart. I think having some kind of curve on the card instead of a straight line to show how the higher-value hands are significantly less likely would have made the messaging clearer.
Cons
- I don’t love that the game gets significantly more difficult as the player count increases. That’s just kind of an odd beat, since telling the difference between extremely similar hands gets frustrating when three players have them. Some mitigation for the player count changes would have been nice.
- I would have loved some narrative or connective tissue between the rounds. There’s not much of a plot, which, after The Crew, is kind of a bummer. It would have been cool to see a bit more plot to the heist.
Overall: 8.5 / 10
Overall, I think The Gang is fantastic! It continues the throughline of The Crew, turning classic games into cooperative experiences that I really like! I think what I like most about this is that it adds some additional structure to a game like The Mind, which I didn’t love, and it gives it a bit more theme that I can latch onto gameplay-wise. You’re still trying to figure out an ordering without much information, but you now have the backdrop of Texas Hold ‘Em and figuring all that out. I do worry that this is a much more challenging game than The Crew if you’re not familiar with Texas Hold ‘Em, for instance, but the rounds play quickly enough that even if a player doesn’t fully understand the game, they can still figure it out without necessarily tanking the whole thing. And you’ll usually see that in the first couple rounds. A lot of players don’t think Two Pair is a good hand since it’s so low in the overall Hand Ranking. Would have been nice if they had some sort of curve on the card just to show how likely certain hands are relative to other hands. Pretty much nothing is a perfect fix though. I also missed The Crew’s narrative elements in The Gang; I feel like the heist vibes would have lent themselves perfectly to a longer-form narrative, but, alas. I’m also a bit confused as to why the game gets so much more difficult at higher player counts. I get it from a gameplay perspective, but I would have liked to see some fixes in place to make it less of a difficulty spike. Game’s fun enough though that I appreciate the challenge, and the extra cards do a great job of offering some options for gradually adjusting the difficulty in one direction or another. It’s a great spin on Texas Hold ‘Em, though, and if you’re looking for that, you enjoy cooperative games, or you just want a short game for everyone, I’d definitely recommend checking The Gang out! It’s a great time.
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