The Gang - Deluxe edition
Sometimes a game comes along that catches you by surprise. The Gang (Kosmos) was certainly one of them. It's essentially just Texas Hold-em Poker, but the tweak from designers John Cooper and Kory Heath is that this is Poker played not as a gambling game but as a limited communication cooperative game where players have to rank their hands in ascending order. There's a little more, in that you draw an event card that makes the next round harder if you succeed and easier if you failed, but at its core The Gang is just cooperative Poker. Despite this, it's proved to be the breakout hit game at our local games group. It's rare for a week to go by without it getting at least a couple of outings as our 'go to' filler.
The basic version of The Gang takes 3–6 players, and since you're collectively ranking your hands it's a game that's a little harder at five and even moreso at six players. With this Deluxe edition you can play the core game but it incorporates several optional variants, some of which were previously available separately, and, like the More Players expansion that appeared earlier this year, it allows you to take the player count up to 10 players.
Kosmos haven't merely thrown in some extra 6+ chips. Recognising that the game steps up in difficulty with every added player, the extra chips include two zero chips (hands taking them must be lower than the 1 but it doesn't matter which order the zero hands are in) and three 'exit' chips. Any player can take an 'exit' chip in addition to their numbered chip. When hands are revealed, those with an 'exit' chip are ignored. The 'exit' chips have the effect of allowing a player to take their hand out of the ranking order altogether. It's a simple but clever way of making the game playable with higher numbers. It's also a simple and straightforward way of modifying the game's difficulty level: find you're usually failing then introduce an 'exit' chip into the mix even if you're playing with just five or six players. Find you're succeeding every time with ten players, then try playing with just two of the 'exit' tokens instead of all three.
In addition to the several variants and mini-expansions, this Deluxe edition comes with suitably blinged-out components, including a neoprene playmat and chunky 'gold' bars to represent each successful round. Our only gripe is over the cards themselves: no complaints about the card design, with art from Fiore, but we're always concerned when cards are printed with black ink bled to the edge. Black-edged cards tend to show little nicks after being handled and shuffled; aesthetically disappointing at first but eventually leaving you with 'marked' cards. Ridiculous as it seems, it means we've felt the need to take the precaution of sleeving all the cards, as we always do with black-edged cards. It'll be the first time we've ended up sleeving an albeit lavish-looking deck of regular playing cards!
