Ten people playing poker together sounds as though it should be loud. The Gang Deluxe has other ideas.

I spent at least four hours playing The Gang Deluxe at the convention with ten people around the table, and I could have happily kept going. It takes something familiar, a table full of poker hands, and turns it into a wonderfully strange cooperative puzzle where everyone is trying to understand everyone else without saying the most useful thing they know.

The Gang is based on Texas Hold’em. We each have our own cards, community cards appear in the middle, and eventually everyone will have a poker hand. Each round has a different color chip for each round.

But we are not trying to beat one another. We are trying to put all ten of our hands in the correct order.

That sounds fairly reasonable until you remember that we cannot simply go around the table saying, “Mine is terrible,” or “I have a flush, everyone move down.” Instead, we have ranking chips…. we fight for the chip of the order we THINK we have. The chips are 0, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, where 8 is the best.

And with ten people, those little chips created a surprising amount of drama. We ended up winning that round. Notice the gold bar we won!

At different points during the hand, the ranking chips are placed in the middle of the table. If I think I have the strongest hand, I might reach for the highest available chip. If someone else thinks their hand is stronger, they may take it from me and leave me reconsidering exactly how confident I was five seconds ago. That was one of my favorite parts of the game.

Sometimes, in the final round people are not 100% sure, of the correct order. They can take an escape token (look at the red escape token above the red 2). This means that my hand is not counted towards the scoring of the round. In a 10 player game, the table gets 3 of these escape tokens.

We won that round! There is something very funny about watching ten people silently negotiate who deserves which position. Nobody can simply explain themselves. You have to make a judgment about your own cards, look at what everyone else seems to believe about theirs, and decide where you belong.

Then somebody reaches for your chip.

Excuse me?

Apparently they think they are stronger.

Perhaps they are.

Or perhaps they have made a terrible mistake.

The wonderful part is that none of us really knows yet.

As more community cards are revealed, we do it again. Now everyone has more information, and the ranking may change completely. A hand that seemed promising earlier might have gone nowhere. Someone who was sitting comfortably near the bottom may suddenly become much more interested in one of those higher chips. The artwork on the cards is just beautiful.

With ten players, every change ripples across the table.

If one person moves up, someone else has to move down. A player may reach confidently for a new position, which makes everyone nearby start wondering what they have seen that the rest of us have not.

There were moments when the ranking seemed settled and then one person would move a chip.

Suddenly everyone was suspicious.

That is where The Gang became much more than simply identifying poker hands for me. We were trying to read one another.

How confident was that move?

Did she grab that chip immediately because her hand is obviously better than mine?

Why is he suddenly willing to move down?

And why does the person with the chip I want seem so certain that it belongs to them?

The chips let us communicate, but imperfectly, and that imperfection is where so much of the fun lives.

Eventually the final cards are revealed and we have to settle into our positions. Then comes the wonderful moment when everyone shows what they actually had. Sometimes our beautiful little ranking was right.

Sometimes it became immediately apparent that somewhere along the way ten intelligent people had collectively made a rather impressive mess. Then we played again.

The Deluxe version adds more to that familiar rhythm, including challenges that can make a round considerably more troublesome. We played long enough to get into the red rounds, where I became extremely grateful for the escapes.

Thank goodness for the escapes.

An escape gives the gang a little mercy when a red challenge has made the situation particularly unpleasant. By that point we had already spent several rounds learning how one another played, so having the game interfere with that comfortable little language we had developed was both frustrating and very funny. And four hours gave us time to develop that language.

That may be what I liked most about playing The Gang Deluxe with such a large group. After enough hands, you begin to recognize how people judge their cards. Someone is cautious. Someone else is optimistic. Someone takes a ranking chip with such confidence that you immediately start doubting your own hand. The Coordinator cards added even more fun to the Deluxe game, with surprises like everyone simultaneously passing one pocket card to the player on their left (photo above).

Ten players also made the cooperative part feel particularly satisfying. Getting two or three people into the correct order is one thing. Looking across a table at ten hidden hands and somehow managing to arrange all of them correctly feels a little miraculous.

It is not really silence either. The restriction on talking about your cards does not make the table quiet. It simply changes what everyone talks about and how we communicate. There are reactions, suspicious looks, laughter, and plenty of attention paid to every hand reaching toward those ranking chips.

Four hours is a long time to spend with one game at a board game convention. There were plenty of other games around us waiting to be played. But we kept dealing another hand. I think that says more about The Gang Deluxe than any score could.

Ten people, ten hidden hands, a row of ranking chips, and an astonishing amount of drama over who gets to claim number seven. We won and I had a wonderful time!

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