The Gang turns Texas Hold’em hand ranking into a cooperative game for 3–6 players in its base edition. You and your teammates must correctly order your poker hands without revealing private cards. Crack three vaults before triggering three alarms. The standard game has three to five heists, each with four chip rounds and a showdown.

Set up the base game

  1. Put three vault and three alarm cards gray-side up near the play area. Give every player the gameplay and hand-ranking reference cards.
  2. For each chip color, use star numbers from 1 up to the number of players. For a four-player game, return the 5- and 6-star chips to the box. Arrange white, yellow, orange and red chips by color.
  3. Shuffle a standard 52-card deck. For each heist, deal two private pocket cards to every player. Leave room for five shared community cards.

The base rulebook recommends completing a basic game before adding its challenge and specialist card modes. No poker betting, money or bluffing is involved.

How a heist proceeds

  1. White, pre-flop: after seeing only your two pocket cards, take a white star chip to express where you think your eventual hand ranks right now relative to the group.
  2. Yellow, flop: reveal three community cards and repeat the ranking process with yellow chips.
  3. Orange, turn: reveal one more community card and take orange chips.
  4. Red, river: reveal the fifth community card and take red chips. These final ranks determine the showdown order.
  5. Showdown: reveal the best five-card hand available to each player from their two cards and the five community cards. Check that the red star chips match weakest-to-strongest order, allowing true poker ties.

In a chip round everyone acts at once. Take a current-color chip from the middle or from another player; you may return your current chip to the middle, but you cannot put it in front of someone else. Hold at most one chip of each color. The round ends once every player has a chip of the current color. Earlier color chips remain in view as clues to how estimates changed.

What can players communicate?

Chip choices and changes are the game’s legal signals. You may not show, say or hint at your private cards. If you know something about another hand only because of your own hidden cards, you may not disclose that deduction. The game is cooperative, but do not bluff; give your best honest ranking at each stage.

You may consider publicly visible community cards and chip movement when assessing relative hands. The strategy guide explains how to use those signals without turning table talk into extra clues.

How does a heist succeed?

Only the red final ordering is checked. When every player’s hand is in the correct order, the heist succeeds and one vault is cracked. If the order is wrong, an alarm is triggered. Win the full game on the third successful vault; lose on the third alarm. A true tie between identical best five-card hands counts as correctly ordered whichever tied player has the higher red star. See the hand-ranking and tie guide for an example.

What changes after a first game?

The base box has an Advanced Mode in which the next heist gains a challenge after a success or a specialist after a failure. Professional and Master Thief modes add harder starting conditions. These are included variants; they do not require an expansion. More Players adds chips and Exit chips for 7–10 people, while the Deluxe edition packages additional material.

More The Gang guides

Sources and scope

Checked September 2026 against the Thames & Kosmos English base rulebook and the Deluxe rulebook. Use the rules and cards in your specific edition for variant effects.

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