The Gang shines in its simplicity

The Gang's cooperative poker is intuitive and stimulating.

If the trick-taking renaissance has taught me anything, it’s that there’s always an audience for games that are on the simpler side, especially games that manage depth inside a simple framework. There’s an art to it that can be lost among the beautiful miniature-laden games that make their home on crowdfunding platforms. There’s a grace that’s lost when we look at some of the great games coming out today that combine several well-established mechanics, like worker placement, deck-building and push-your-luck.

Heavy, strategic games have value. Don’t get me wrong: I would love to sit down with you and learn any game you’re interested in teaching, no matter where it ranks on the scale. A difficult, weighty game with first-round decisions that can make or break your game? I’m in. But I do think something is lost when we turn our focus so squarely on these lengthy, heavy experiences.

It’s with all that in mind that I’m here talking about one of my favorite games of 2024, The Gang. It’s about as rules-light as you would expect for a game with a tagline of “cooperative poker.” You need to know just a few things to play this game. First, you must understand how rounds are structured — when more cards are flipped, really. Second, you must understand the relative ranking of the poker hands. (The game provides a nice card with this on it.) Finally, you must understand that you’re picking a token indicating the strength of your hand each round. It’s really that simple.

The Gang | Photo by Matt Montgomery

The Gang works, though. It’s a game in which only the final round of decisions matters, too. Half of this game is basically built around saying “I guess I can take that one? If I have to?” and taking one of the poker chips as you try to assess your hand against others’. There’s magic there, though. See, that uncertainty is the core of The Gang. In The Gang, you’re basically working collectively to rank your hand amongst your teammates’. After four rounds — pre-flop, flop, turn and river (or, three cards, a fourth card, then a fifth card) — your choices actually matter, and you’ll reveal each hand starting from the weakest.

The Gang takes the language of poker and spins it into a new game. The game works precisely because there’s a generally held cultural understanding of poker. Because we understand poker, The Gang works pretty seamlessly. You could plop the game in front of somebody with even minor experience in recreational poker and get it moving in a matter of minutes — and with some practice, you could get that time down. (I’d totally watch speed runs of game explanations on Twitch or another streaming platform.)

It’s not just about the game working for poker players, though. No, this game works just as well for people without poker experience, and while the rules explanation will be slightly longer, the game isn’t diminished. It’s not an expansion for people who already love Texas Hold’em — it’s a unique entity in its own right. The trappings of poker aren’t here at all. While there are chips, they’re not used for betting: The chips exist only to convey information. While that is something that you could argue about poker writ large, it’s their only purpose here.

A bad hand in poker is a disappointment; in The Gang, it’s merely information to be communicated. When somebody else has a good hand, there’s an excitement in figuring out where you sit, relative to each other. The Gang flips poker’s feeling on its head, and it does it using its mechanics, its language.

The Gang feels like the sort of game you’d design if you wanted to make a cooperative version of poker. Its decisions feel intuitive and obvious. Here’s the thing, though: It hadn’t happened — at least not on this scale — until The Gang dropped. Cooperative games have been a mainstay in modern board game design for 15 years, but it’s not until 2024 that cooperative poker made an appearance. The best designs feel inevitable, and The Gang feels that way. It doesn’t complicate anything: It just works.

The Gang works, and it’s not just because of poker. I’ve played the game several times with players of various skill levels. With some friends with whom we often play cooperative games, we breezed through a three-player game, and next time we play, we may want to roll out some of the game’s more advanced features. With some of my wife’s younger cousins, we struggled through a five-player game, then we breezed through a three-player game. With my in-laws, we fought hard in two four-player games. In each case, the game worked.

With every group I’ve played, the dynamic has shifted significantly. Repeated plays with the same group will lend itself to an intuitive understanding of how people think about their hands, and some of those ideas have cropped up in every group with whom I’ve played. (A standard one I’ve seen: Pretty quickly after the first round, people start estimating their hand confidently if they have even a pair of cards. It makes sense, but it’s still fun to see it emerge consistently. Again, The Gang is an intuitive game.) It’s not like play converges to a single point, but those commonalities are an extra piece of delight.

The game thrives, though, when players are trying to find the difference between hands that are remarkably close. The best points of the game don’t emerge when players have obviously better or worse hands, but when they’re trying to find the slivers of light between three hands with just a high card, each of which is ace-high. It’s when you have three hands with pairs, but you have to figure out who has the best hand without even mentioning what you’re holding.

I’ve gone through all this without even mentioning the novel part of The Gang that expands the game simply beyond cooperative poker, though. There’s an advanced mode of play in which losing a round gives you a card that’s advantageous, and winning a round gives you a card that’s going to make things slightly (or radically) more difficult. Those are interesting and change the shape of the game, but it shines in its most basic play.

The Gang is an achievement of a game. Come Spiel des Jahres nomination time, I fully expect The Gang to make the list. Does it have what it takes to win? I don’t know — it might fit perfectly into the complexity mold of past winners like Just One, Kingdomino, Dixit and MicroMacro: Crime City. It doesn’t fit as well against the last three winners, though: Sky Team, Dorfromantik, and Cascadia. We’ll see!

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Hey, thanks for joining me this week! I hope you’re doing well and enjoying this holiday season. A few programming notes, because the next two Wednesdays fall on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, respectively. Next week, I’m planning to publish as usual on Christmas Day, but I generally write these a few days in advance. I don’t expect most of you to read it, but one of my editors gave me some great advice years ago: There are a lot of people who don’t have people to spend time with on major holidays, and the world just stopping can be a hard thing. It’s not difficult to write something and schedule it.

I’d like to do something a little different, though: I’d love to share some of your favorite gaming memories. If you’ve got one that sticks out that you’re willing to share, either by name or anonymously, send me an email (it’s on the About page if you’ve come to this on the web, or you can respond to this email if you’ve got it in your inbox), a DM or a comment telling me about a memory. I’ll share some of mine, too.

For New Year’s Day, expect something shortly after the new year begins. We’ll see what day that is specifically. After that, we’ll get right back to the usual Wednesday schedule. As we get a bit further into January, I’ll be starting my look back at 2024 — I’m excited to talk about some of my very favorite games of the year.

See you then!