Rumour has it that The Gang was created in response to the success of The Crew. A cooperative version of a commonly know card game was allegedly the starting point for the designers. But The Gang doesn’t build on German trick-taking games; it uses poker instead. In particular one of its better known variants: Texas Hold’em. The goal is to have the strongest hand at the end of the round. The flow of the game (with the exception of bidding rules) is sufficiently explained in the rulebook to The Gang, so I won’t repeat it here. To make sure that players can tell the difference between a strong hand and a weak hand, even without any prior knowledge, every player is given a card that lists all relevant card combinations. So far, so run-of-the-mill.

But instead of bidding money The Gang comes with pre-printed chips, with which you communicate the relative strength of your hand to your fellow players. Because the cooperative element of The Gang lies in accurately predicting your hand’s strength in comparison to those of the other players. Does your pair of fours happen to be the weakest hand, the strongest hand or (which is usually the most difficult position to take) is it somewhere in the middle? Only if all players have correctly ranked their hands, is the group successful.

In regular poker the moments of tension are to a large part the result of playing for money. If you risk too little, the game feels tepid. But if you risk a bit much, emotions might quickly boil over. That’s why watching poker tournaments is to some extent watching the pressure that none of the players want to admit they’re under. Intensely blank faces (sometimes covered by sunglasses and/or a baseball cap) flatly pick up cards, push their bids towards the middle of the table or throw their cards back into the game. The highlight reels of such tournaments often show the artificially casual conversation and the occasional emotional outburst. As much as silence and trivial chatter seems to characterize these tables, there’s a lot simmering under the surface. This lack of expression – coining the term ‘pokerface’ – is meant to reveal exactly nothing about your own hand. That’s what makes these games so thrilling: the vast gap between meaningless smalltalk and a massive jackpot within the players’ grasp.

Depending on how willing or able a gaming group is to adopt pokerfaces at the table, The Gang will play out as either a challenging and tense deduction task, or like a cheery, light-hearted guessing game in the vein of The Mind. The more expressive we play, i.e. we let our facial expressions and body language reveal our thoughts, the more The Gang gains the breeziness of a party game. When a chip keeps going back and forth between two players, it tends to amuse everyone at the table. In these moments The Gang has a strong sense of humour, though not a lot of tension.

But when you go back to the virtues of playing poker, i.e. neutral body language and a blank facial expression, The Gang offers a far more intriguing challenge. Evaluating each other’s hands becomes deeply interwoven with the probabilities of somebody else holding a stronger pair of cards than you do. Each newly revealed card shifts our mental calculations. Some card combinations can be ruled out, while others increase in (relative) strength. This is where The Gang moves away from comparisons to The Mind, and returns to its roots as a poker variant.

The Gang is a game in which players have much more influence on how the game feels to play, than they might be aware of. Their chosen playstyle will determine if The Gang is a game with tense moments of tactics and convoluted deductions; or a cheery exaggeration of our emotions, as we fight over pulling the “right” chip towards us. The Gang allows for both approaches, though not at the same time.

Aside from the standard deck of cards, the game comes with some challenge and support cards. These introduce short-term rules which either make the game more challenging or easier to win. This should help ensure that experienced poker players as well as clueless novices will feel a sense of achievement.

The Gang is unlikely to escape its inspiration’s shadow. For that it lacks the pedestrian “added value” of 50 rules variants, repackaged as a storyline. But then again, a successful game of The Gang feels less like a correctly solved puzzle. It’s more like a shrewd team effort by a gang of dauntless poker aces. And that’s pretty cool, actually.