Wouter & Ymke 
The Gang is a cooperative card game about pulling off a series of vault heists. You and your friends are a crew of thieves, and instead of cracking safes with drills, you do it with poker hands. Let’s be real, that already sounds a bit silly, and that’s kind of why I wanted to try it.
It’s based on Texas Hold’em. You get two private cards, there are five shared ones, and you make the best poker hand you can, just like in real poker. But instead of trying to beat each other, you’re all trying to figure out who has the best hand, second best, worst, and so on, without talking about your cards. You either get the order right and crack a vault, or you mess it up and set off the alarm.
A full game is basically a race. You need three successful heists before you get three alarms. Everyone wins or loses together, which sounds cozy, but also means every mistake is painfully public. There’s no bluffing, no trash talk, and no clever lying your way out of trouble. You just quietly look at your cards and think, ok… how bad am I really?
And then you try to communicate that with a little plastic chip. Good luck.
👥 3-6 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 20 minutes
📝 Designers: John Cooper & Kory Heath
🎨 Artwork: Fiore GmbH
🏢 Publisher: 999 Games (Dutch version, review copy provided)
Gameplay overview
Each player gets two private cards. Five community cards show up in the middle of the table, slowly, just like in normal poker. From those seven cards, you always build your best five card hand. That part is the easy, familiar bit.
The weird part is how you talk to each other. You’re not allowed to say anything about your cards. Not even little hints. You can’t say “I’m doing pretty well” or “this is terrible.” The only way you communicate is by taking numbered chips that show how strong you think your hand is compared to the others.
Low stars mean you think you’re weak. High stars mean you think you’re strong. And that’s it. That’s your entire language.
A heist has four rounds.
First is the pre-flop. You only have your two cards. Everyone takes a white chip to show how good they think their starting hand is.
Then comes the flop. Three community cards appear. You take a yellow chip to update your opinion.
Then the turn adds one more card. You take an orange chip.
Then the river adds the final card. You take a red chip. This one is the important one, because it decides the final order.
After that, everyone reveals their hands, starting with the lowest red chip. If every hand is the same strength or better than the one before it, you did it. Vault cracked. If someone turns out to be weaker than a player who already revealed, the order was wrong and you set off an alarm.
Artwork, components, and visual design
Let’s not pretend this is some big table spectacle. It’s cards and chips. That’s basically it. But to be fair, they’re nice cards and chips.
The chips are chunky, poker-style discs in white, yellow, orange, and red, with little stars on them. They feel good in the hand, and honestly that matters more than it should. Taking a chip from someone else feels just a bit more dramatic when the chip has some weight to it.
The cards look fine. The normal deck is just playing cards with a custom look, and the vault and alarm cards have this heist theme going on. Nothing mind blowing, but it all fits together and doesn’t look cheap.
Everything comes in a small shiny box that’s easy to bring along, which feels right for a game that lives somewhere between poker and a party game.
Our experience
The Gang feels a lot like someone took poker and asked, what if everyone was on the same side for once?
The idea of turning Texas Hold’em into a shared puzzle actually works. Instead of trying to outplay each other, you’re all staring at the same table, trying to figure out how everyone fits into it. And the chips turn that into this little thing of confidence and doubt. You see someone start with a high chip and then slowly slide down, and you’re like… ok, something bad happened over there.
Sometimes it’s really satisfying. The table slowly settles into a clear order, and when the last card is revealed, everyone kind of nods like yeah, that makes sense. Other times it’s just messy. You know you’re not the worst, but are you second worst? Third? You have no idea, and neither does anyone else.
The chip grabbing can also get a bit frantic. You’re allowed to take chips from each other during a round, so the last few seconds may turn into this awkward scramble of hands. Some groups love that. Some really don’t. I must admit, it depends a lot on the people you’re playing with.
And that’s kind of the thing with this game. It’s very group dependent. If people are comfortable being read and misread, it’s great. If someone hates uncertainty or being judged, even in a friendly way, it can feel rough.
Player count matters too. With more people, everything gets harder. Not because the rules change, but because humans are bad at being precise in large groups.
We also had a few games where someone didn’t really know poker yet, and that slowed things down. Still, it kind of worked as a teaching tool. Losing a heist because you misread a straight is a surprisingly effective lesson.
Our thoughts
In my experience, The Gang is a clever idea that mostly does what it promises. It takes something a lot of people already know, poker, and flips it into something quieter and more awkward, in a good way.
The chip system is the heart of it. It’s not just about where you end up in the final round. It’s about how you got there. Those earlier chips tell a story, and over time, groups start to read each other as much as the cards. That’s cool, but it also means new players can feel a bit lost at a table with regulars.
The difficulty doesn’t really come from the cards. It comes from people. More players means more chances to get something wrong, and the game doesn’t really help you out. You just have to be better at reading the room.
The advanced modes are nice for that. Winning makes things harder, losing makes things easier, and it all kind of balances itself out. The more intense modes, where challenges stick around, turn the game into something a bit more stressful. Not always in a bad way, but yeah, not everyone wants their cooperative poker to feel like that intense.
In the end, I like The Gang for what it is. It’s not super deep, and it’s probably not going to replace your favorite card game. But it does something I haven’t really seen before. It turns poker into shared guessing, tiny signals, and that one big reveal at the end where everyone holds their breath.
📝 We got a review copy from 999 Games.
