The Gang is a cooperative poker-inspired card game.

Can you work together to pull off a series of bank heists?

Round up your gang and get ready to pull off a series of bank heists using the power of poker!

The Gang Game Overview

Each round begins with everyone getting two private cards and a shared set of community cards. You reveal, pre-flop, flop, turn, and river, just like Texas Hold’em.

Before any community cards are shown, and again after each reveal, players choose (without talking about their hand) a ranking token. This token will indicate to the other players how strong they think their hand is.

Once all community cards are out, you evaluate all of the players’ hands and compare them to each other.

If every player’s ranking choice is correct, they successfully open a vault. If any ranking is wrong, an alarm is triggered.

How Do You Win?

Play continues until either three vaults are opened and the players win, or three alarms are triggered and the players lose.

Main Mechanisms

The main mechanism is co-op deduction based on an increasing amount of information.

You quietly evaluate the player’s hand strength by watching which ranking token they take.

USP

A co-op twist on poker is unique.

Theme

The theme is light and is only seen through a few cards.

Setup

Shuffle a standard 52-card deck, deal two cards to each player and stack up the ranking tokens.

Components & Artwork

A standard card deck plus a set of ranking chips and some other cards for tracking alarms triggered, and vaults cracked.

Ease of Teaching

This is easy to teach, but only if players know how Texas Hold ’em works. Otherwise, you’re teaching two games.

Similar Games

The Crew has you play a familiar system, in trick-taking, with co-op play and limited communication.

The Gang Review

Positives

A fresh cooperative take on poker hand reading and group deduction.

Fast rounds make it easy to get multiple plays in a session.

A ‘win’ for a round is satisfying.

Negatives

Silent ranking can feel frustrating if players are unfamiliar with poker hand strength.

One misread round and it’s all over for that attempt.

If players over-communicate, even subtlyor “accidentally”, it undermines the game’s tension.

Summary

The Gang turns Texas Hold’em into a cooperative team challenge that’s quick, approachable, and tense.