The idea of cooperative poker is one of those things that sounds like it should work. Cooperative Texas Hold’em in particular is what The Gang from Kosmos promises. Now that I’ve had a chance to play it, is it something that actually works. Or does the premise just stray too far from what poker is to make a good game? Join me as I talk about how The Gang plays and what works and what doesn’t.

How To Play The Gang

The Gang is a cooperative Texas Hold’em style poker game where instead of bidding on how strong your hand is, you are trying to get the hands of all the players in order after the river. But you work off of the knowledge from how strong people think their hands are prior to the river. If you get it correct three times you win, if you get it wrong three times, you lose.

The Texas Hold’em

The Gang follows Texas Hold’em style poker when you are building up your best hand of cards. For those who aren’t familiar, I’ll cover it briefly before we get into the rest of the game. You get a two card hand. Then more cards are played out into a communal pool. They are the flop, the turn, and the river. The flop is going to add three cards and the turn and river one card each. The player with the best hand between their cards and the communal cards wins the hand.

Getting the Order Right

So let’s talk about how you get the order right. In The Gang, let’s say for a six player game, you want the player with the best hand to have the poker chip worth six when you rank hands after the river and the player with the worst had having the one.

You are allowed to discuss how strong you feel your hand is. But you are not able to say specifics about your hand. An example might be: “My hand got better with the flop.” Or another example would be “I have a scoring hand now.” You are not allowed to specify how it got better or how it is scoring just that it is.

So after the initial hand of two cards is dealt, the flop, the turn, and the river, players take chips as to how they think their hand is. This is all after the discussion. But it is just the ranking of the hand on the final round that is going to determine if your order is right.

Tie-Breaking

I thought about putting this up in the Texas Hold’em section, but let’s talk about tie breaking. When you think of a scoring hand, for example two pair, you think of that being your hand. But it is possible to have the same thing as someone else. So you use standard tie-breakers like in poker. The higher pair of the two pair is compared, if one person has higher than the other, they are ahead. If they are the same, you check the next pair.

Now let’s use the example of a single pair. If you have a single pair and someone else has that pair, how do you decide the tie-breaker? Well, in that case you look at the kicker. That is that you look at the highest single card that you use to make your hand. If those are the same, often the case if they are in the communal cards, you keep comparing until you get through your hand of five scoring cards. If it is still a tie, the order doesn’t matter because they are the same.

Increasing the Challenge

So it is possible that you’ll find it gets too easy over time. So the game offers ways to make it more challenging or easier. One being positive and negative modifier cards. So if you win one round you flip a negative modifier card, such as a single player must take the one for the first three rounds of discussion. Or it might give you an extra card for your hand if you lost the previous time. This is going to add just a little twist to what the game is already doing.

What Doesn’t Work

The game can skew a bit easy at times. This is something that you can control with how much communication you allow. If you keep that to very general terms it is going to be more difficult. If you reference previous hands or things like that, it is going to be a bit easier. Also player count is going to make it harder or easier depending on how many players you have, the more the harder.

The other thing, and this more of a to be aware of, some knowledge of poker and Texas Hold’em does help. In particular with knowing how strong a hand is in Texas Hold’em can be important. A good pair might be the best overall hand. The game does give you a cheat sheet to know the ranks of hands but if you are a poker novice, this is going to be a notable learning curve.

What Works

The game is fast to set-up and play. While the discussion at times can take a bit, it isn’t generally that long. Because you care about getting it right at the end, only after the river is the discussion highly important. But for getting the game to the table, it is shuffle up and deal cards and that’s about it to get it to work. Especially if the players have played the game before, it is going to instantly get to the table.

The cooperative nature of the game works as well. That was my big concern going into the game. But I like how it works and the challenge of ranking the hands is good. We got better at it as we played. It is common, though, to end the game with a discussion around how strong you feel a hand is and for two players to have extremely close hands. That challenge works well for the game.

I also like the benefits if you fail or the negatives if you pass. And I think I could see even making that more challenging by playing on some of the harder modes. But they offer just a little twist or variety to what is happening in the game. Is it needed for the game, probably not if you don’t play too many times in one sitting. As the group changes, the dynamic is going to change. But with a group playing a few times in a row, it adds in some good variety.

Who is The Gang For?

I think The Gang is a good game for a mixed group of board gamers and maybe poker players or cards players. If you play a lot of cards, you probably have dabbled with poker of some variety. The trickiest part is going to be if you play with someone who doesn’t play poker. And by that I mean more hasn’t played poker. I don’t play poker often, but I know how it works as I’ve played some. But if it is completely new, maybe play a couple of hands of real poker first to get them familiarized.

Final Thoughts and Grade on The Gang

This one is interesting for me. Firstly, I want to say that I really like what it does for a cooperative poker game. And you will find that I rate it highly. However, on the flip side, I think it is a game that I want to play only so often and with varying groups. If I play it with one group over and over again, I suspect I will want to play it on the hardest difficulty. But I want to play it again, so there is that.

The other thing is that I think people who like The Gang are going to like it a lot. The people who doesn’t like The Gang, it is going to be a strong dislike of the game. Mainly because it is cooperative, limited communication, and poker. Somewhere in that combination there is a chance for a lot of players to dislike it. You might dislike cooperative games. Or you might dislike games where it limits what you can say. Or you might dislike the luck of poker. But if you are cool with all of those things, then it is a very good game.

My Grade: B+
Gamer Grade: C+
Casual Grade: B-
Strategy (out of 10): 0
Luck (out of 10): 2

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