The Gang

Objective and scope: The Gang is cooperative poker, not a betting contest for individual victory. The team uses chips each round to signal its assessment of hand strength, then tries to rank all players’ final hands correctly at the showdown. This summary follows the 2024 Thames & Kosmos base-game rules, for 3–6 players; the publisher lists ages 10+ and about 20 minutes.

Base setup: Use a standard 52-card deck, vault and alarm cards, colored star chips, and reference cards. Place three vault cards and three alarm cards for the base game. Remove chips whose star value exceeds the number of players. Give each player a turn and poker-hand reference card. Leave the Challenge and Specialist cards in the box for the base game. Players may not show or publicly discuss their hands.

Round 1, Pre-Flop: Deal two face-down private cards to each player. Players may look at their own cards but must keep them secret. No community cards have been revealed yet, so each player estimates where their possible hand strength might rank relative to the others. Everyone simultaneously uses a white chip to communicate that relative assessment. The chip’s star value indicates the player’s estimated position, and the team can observe the choices and adjustments.

Round 2, Flop: Reveal three community cards. Each player reassesses their hand using their private cards and the new shared information, then distributes a yellow chip. The white chips remain on the table so the team can observe how assessments changed; yellow chips express the new ranking estimate. Players still may not share their hands or private inferences about other players. They communicate only through the chip actions allowed by the rules.

Rounds 3 and 4: During the Turn, reveal the fourth community card and distribute orange chips. During the River, reveal the fifth community card and distribute red chips. In each round, reassess the likely final hand strength from the information available. Earlier chips remain visible, while the red chips provide the order for the showdown. Follow the base rules for chip movement; a player may not directly place their current-round chip in front of another player.

Hands and showdown: Each player makes the best five-card hand from their two hole cards and five community cards. Standard poker rankings, from highest to lowest, are royal flush, other straight flushes, four of a kind, full house, flush, straight, three of a kind, two pair, one pair, and high card; compare card values within a category. After the River round, players reveal their hands in red-chip order and identify their best five-card hand.

Success and failure: The team must rank every player correctly by final hand strength. If two or more players have exactly equal hands, their order relative to one another does not matter, but their positions compared with other players must still be right. If the full ordering is correct, turn one vault card to its gold side. If any part of the order is wrong, turn an alarm card to its red side and begin another heist.

Game end: Continue with new heists until three vaults have been completed or three alarms have been triggered. If the team reaches three successes first, everyone wins; if the alarms reach three first, everyone loses. The base rules do not award individual points or name an individual winner. Because play stops as soon as one threshold is reached, a full game generally takes three to five heists, each consisting of four rounds of hand-strength assessment.

Advanced modes and boundaries: After learning the base game, players can add Advanced, Professional, or Master Thief rules, which introduce Challenge and Specialist cards or additional mission conditions. They remain cooperative hand-ranking modes. On page 17, the base rulebook’s Challenge 7: Laser Tripwires prose conflicts with its card summary graphic, and no publisher erratum was found; this draft does not repeat the disputed trigger. Seven-to-ten-player play belongs to a separate expansion or Deluxe product, not the base box.