Suit Up

A recent article by my friend Adam Richards over at Punchboard extolled the virtues of traditional games. By this Adam was referring to games like Chess, Mancala, Go, and the numerous games that emerge from a simple deck of playing cards. Games that are older than some countries, and have influence worldwide. I have had the pleasure of turning my hand to reviewing some traditional games like Bagh-Chal and Latrunculi and, like all games, there are the good and the bad to be experience.

I agree whole heartedly with Adam that these traditional games can still bring something to our tables and that they should not be overlooked. Recently I picked up The Gang, a game that descends from Poker and brings a fascinating co-operative twist to the traditional gambling stalwart. You heard me right. The Gang is co-operative poker. A concept that has no right to work as well as it does. 

The Gang comes from designers John Cooper and Kory Heath, with illustration and graphic design from Fiore GmbH (a German game design studio). It is published by Thames & Kosmos. It sets you up as a team robbing a casino. 3 heists must be carried out to win.

I bought The Gang with my own money. It was not received as a review copy.

Poker is easily one of the most well known games in the world. From international tournaments with prices in the millions of dollars, to late night TV with commentators, it is a game embedded deep in our culture. It has been in numerous films, been the inspiration for hit video games, and has had numerous books written about its nuances. It is seen as cool, glamorous, and a bellwether as to how good you can be at bluffing and reading people.

The Gang asks you to turn your perception of Poker on its head. It wants you to communicate your hand strength, not hide it. Of course this is not as easy at just blurting out what you have. That would make for a dull, and short, game. No, instead the information is passed between players through the other component associated with Poker: Poker Chips.

Before we dive into this I’d like to reassure you of something. You don’t need to know Poker to play this game. Will knowing it help? Yes, of course. I also think you’ll get a little more from The Gang if you do have a familiarity with Poker. The game’s rulebook is great and there are player aides for everyone to help remember the flow of the game and the ranking of poker hands.

The Gang has the form of Poker. We start with a pair of cards: pocket cards. White poker chips equal to the number of players are laid out. Each one has a ranking on it indicated by stars. So for a four player game we have four chips with 1-4 stars available. As the players consider their pocket cards, each player claims one of the chips to indicate how good they feel their final hand will be, based on that pair of cards.

As chips are taken, individual confidence changes. You can only have one chip at a time in front of you, but the dance of declaration is a complex one. You take a 2, but Caroline takes a 3. You look at each other wondering if this is right. You voice your concerns, without talking about the strength of your hand. The game forbids this particular piece of chat. Dave immediately took the 1, a confident showing of how weak they know their hand to be. Alex is left with the 4 but expresses uncertainty at being left with it. Your confidence changes. Putting back the 2 you take the 4. Is that relief on Alex’s face? Disappointment? You aren’t sure.

Eventually you settle on your chips. Then the flop is dealt, 3 cards face-up. These are sometimes called community cards. Everyone uses the pair of cards in their hands and these community cards to make up a five card poker hand. You reassess the relative position of the hand you can make. 4 yellow chips hit the table, ranked in the same way as the white. The dance begins again.

We do this again with a fourth community card , the Turn, and a final time with a fifth card, the River. Orange and then red chips are laid out and exchanged to show hand strength. Eyebrows are raised, speculation is voiced, well intentioned arguments are conducted. The table talk is part and parcel of this game.

Where Poker is a game of silent glances, and stares of speculation, The Gang gives way to conversation. As long as you don’t discuss your hand, or use that information to talk about other people’s, you can natter as you see fit. This is a welcome change from other limited communication games, that sometimes feel like an exercise in sitting silently with your friends. It also lends to the co-operative feel. It is hard to feel like you are working together when you can’t talk to each other.

Over the course of the 4 rounds we have communicated the fluctuations in our fortunes. Laid out before each player between the chips they have chosen and the cards on the table is an augury of where their hand lies. Only that final red chip matters in the grand scheme. We are looking to rob this casino with a series of heists, and we win a heist by being perfectly in-sync. This is represented by the red chips being with the correct people at the end of the fourth round. When the poker hands are revealed the ranking of the chips should perfectly align with the ranking of those hands. 

Starting with the 1 star chip and ascending, the poker hands are revealed. Each time the pocket cards are thrown down, you feel yourself holding your breath. Will Caroline’s reveal mean you have made a mistake? Was Dave right in being so confident that he had the worst hand? There are high fives, comisserations, fist pumping moments of triumph, and head holding moments of loss.

On your initial plays you’ll get used to communicating with the chips. Once you are settled in you can engage with the other mechanism that is in this svelte box: challenges and specialists. These are slowly introduced in the higher difficulties.

At these higher difficulties every time you win a heist you get a new challenge card, every time you lose you get a specialist. Challenges make things just that little bit trickier: no chips in the first round giving you less information, or having to guess the hand rank of the person with the highest red chip before the reveal. Fail and you lose. Specialists give you a hand; swapping pocket cards for more information, an extra one to choose from, or one person declaring their hand rank once per heist. 

All the changes here are subtle, but higher difficulties can stack them up. These give you a lot of interesting little puzzles to solve on top of the core problem of simply communicating correctly with each other in restricted circumstances. 

Games draw us in with clever mechanisms, interesting themes, and beautiful production. A great game keeps us inside its magic circle, substituting its reality for our own. The Gang’s theme is heists, but that aspect is painted on thinly at best. The social setup the game draws us into is magic enough to compensate for that slight flaw. When you manage to get the poker hands in the correct order it feels like a moment of celebration. You have connected with the other people around the table in a way you didn’t think possible.

One of the core principles of Poker is to not communicate the strength of your cards. The Gang’s genius move is to throw that in reverse but tie your hands while doing so. In basing a game in the familiar while changing its fundamental nature, we get moments of incredible triumph and crushing defeat. Successfully carrying off a heist feels like you have truly come together as a team. The Gang achieves this with a lightness of touch that few other games can hold a candle to.

Are you in or do you fold? 

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