Howdy amigos, buckaroos and bandidos. It’s time to pull off a heist together and empty the safes before all the alarm bells start ringing. How are we going to do this? Like real cowboys, Texas Hold’em style. So put on your cowboy hat and put on your best poker face for a cooperative game of poker with The Gang.
The Gang is a cooperative variant of poker, devised by John Cooper and Kory Heath. Wondering how you turn a game centred around gambling and bluffing into a cooperative experience? The answer: make sure players have to gamble together, or at least estimate who has the best cards.
If you’re familiar with Texas Hold’em, you can get started almost straight away. Each player receives two cards. Based on these, players determine whether they have a good chance at the “winning” hand. This happens over the four phases of the poker game. Players use chips each round to indicate the “strength” of their hand. They are not allowed to communicate about the value of their cards.
After distributing the chips in the first round, three cards are revealed. Players then distribute chips for the second round. In this way, they can better estimate who might be able to form a strong hand with the cards in their hand and on the table. In the third round, a fourth card is revealed, and in the fourth round, a fifth card.
After the final round, players reveal their cards. If they have assigned the order of strength correctly, they may open a safe. If the order is incorrect, an alarm goes off. Players win once they have opened three safes, and lose if the alarm goes off three times.
For extra variety, players can add different challenges and modules, but the base game already offers enough challenge and cooperative satisfaction, comparable to games like The Mind, The Crew, Bomb Busters and Take Time. The Gang is a suspiciously good twist on the classic poker game.
In memoriam
John Cooper and Kory Heath – the creators of The Gang – have developed several games together and separately over the years. Kory Heath was known, among other things, for the game Zendo. After a long battle with chronic pain and depression, Kory Heath passed away in November 2024. The Gang is thus the last game from this designer. Read more at https://boardgamegeek.com/blog/1/blogpost/167622/in-memoriam-kory-heath.
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