Players: 3-4
Playing Time: 1 hour
Complexity: 3 (of 10)
The Components
Gang of Four is essentially a card game packaged as a board game, a type of packaging which honestly bugs me a little bit because it tends to create large, mostly empty boxes, and because it increases price point. On the other hand, I also understand the necessity, as you frequently need a higher price point to make a game economical to produce, and because you almost definitely need a larger box to get any attention on a store shelf.
Given these necessities, Gang of Four does its production right. There's a tray to one side of the box to hold the cards, so that you don't have to rubber band them, and there's even a little fold-out tab at the top, to help keep the cards contained. In addition, advantage is taken of the larger box to include a large-sized rulebook and to also include a scorepad.
The cards themselves are normal-sized, glossy cards with rounded corners. They seem to be thick enough to stand up to repeated play. The back of each card is a very nice design, showing the Gang of Four logo, a dragon, and a number of Chinese characters, all within a cartouche.
The front of each card shows the number of the card (1-10), along with the appropriate Chinese characters, all printed in the appropriate color (red, yellow, or green). There are also two phoneix cards and one dragon card, which are quite evocative and a multi-colored "1" which is colorful. Printed on a white background, the cards are plain but utilitarian.
A few reference cards are also included, which show the ordering of the different types of plays, a bunch of rank order examples, and some key rules. These are quite useful for a first-time player, and thus a nice plus. If anything I would have liked to see a few extra copies of the card ordering info.
The rulebook is 12 pages long, printed on glossy paper in full color. Overall, they're relatively concise, and fairly easy to reference, though I had some issues with the explanation of some of the allowable plays. One of the core rules of the game, which will not be obvious to first time gamers is "Each player then in turn, plays a combination of cards made of the same number of cards as the opening combination in a higher rank, or passes." The emphasis is mine, and could have been used within the rulebook itself. The rules are also not entirely clear whether you can play a "Gang of Five" (or 6 or 7) at any time, or if you may only play those on top of "Gangs of Four" (more on all the terms in a second). I'd guess one way based upon the rules, but the opposite based on the Key Rules card.
Overall, though, the rules are fairly simple, and the rulebook does get you through them.
The score card is nicely designed. It lists exactly how to do the scoring, reminds you to keep reversing the direction of play, and gives spaces for up to 4 players.There are, I'd guess, about 50 sheets on the pad, which is enough for quite a few games.
Overall. assessing all of that and considering the $20 price point, I was tempted to mark Gang of Four as entirely average in Style: a 3. However, the game also featues one other bonus: the online support.
I usually stop by a manufacturer's web site when I'm writing up a review, and Days of Wonder is providing better support than perhaps any other strategy game manufacturer that I've seen. The rules, scorepads, and ref cards are all available as PDFs, and there are also some very attractive desktop images.
In addition, purchase of Gang of Four gives you access for a year to an online version of the game, and thus an opportunity to play the game even when you don't have friends around. The Java client looks fairly smooth and intuitive. I had it crash out on me a few times, but only when I was leaving a game, not in the middle, and that's relatively par for the course for Java. There generally seemed to be a half-dozen or so people around the online community, and thus there's opportunity to get into a game if you want. A large number of the current players are French, but that didn't seem to pose any notable problems, and the "drop-out" problem which is so common for online versions of tabletop games was almost non-existent here.
Overall, I though that the online game and online support added enough to the game that it bumped my assessment of Gang of Four's style from 3 to 4.
The Game Play
At the start of each round of play, each player in the Gang of Four (3 or 4 total, though the game is clearly designed for 4) is dealt 16 cards. It's then each player's job to try and get rid of all his cards first.
Each round is in turn divided into a number of cycles. At the start of a cycle, the lead player plays between 1 and 5 cards: a single card, a pair, three of a kind; or one of the five of a kind combinations. (Yeah, four of a kind's in there too, but it's a special wild set called the Gang of Four, which we'll get, and thus very unlikely to be a cycle-starting play.)
The five card combinations deserve a bit extra explanation. There are four types which are, in order of value:
Straight
Flush
Full House
Straight Flush
Once a player has determined the number of cards for the current cycle of play, each other player in the game must also play that same number of cards, but they must play cards of higher value than the previous play.
And, for these purposes, its useful to note that Red is ranked higher than Yellow is ranked higher than Green. The Phoenixes are greater than the 10 and the Dragon is greater than the Phoenix.
Thus, not only can you play a "4" over a "3", or a pair of "5"s over a pair of "2"s, but you can also play a red "7" over a yellow "7", or for that matter a pair of a red "3" and a yellow "3" over a red "3" and green "3", because in every case, according to our ranking rules, the newer play is higher than the last. As my 5-card combo chart shows, you can also play flushes over straights, etc. (or a red flush over a yellow flush, or a 7-5-3-2-1 red flush over a 6-5-3-2-1 flush). This might all seem a bit nonintuitive, but it's clearly noted on those reference cards I mentioned, and after a few rounds of play you'll find it all becomes very clear.
There's only one oddity: a "Gang of Four" (four of a kind) can be played on top of anything, no matter how many cards were in the previous plays. And at that point you can keep playing higher Gangs of Four (or Five or Six or Seven). Eventually, no one can play higher (or no one wants to, as you don't have to play, even if you can), and a new lead is made, with between 1-5 cards, by the last person who played in the previous cycle.
The core of the game involves getting the lead so that you can play numbers of cards that benefit you and help you to clear your hand.
At the end, when someone has emptied all of the cards out of his hand, each other player is then given points equal to the number of cards he has in his hand, possibly times a multiplier if he has a lot of cards left. (In one of our playtest rounds, I was left with all 16 still in my hand, which was worth a big 80 points.) This causes another level of strategy to the game, where you may decide to clear as many cards from your hand as you can, even if down the road it might make it harder to clear out your hand entirely (ie, you might toss down a 5-card flush, even if it messes up a couple of triplets you have, in order to get those 5 cards out of your hand immediately).
The game ends when someone reaches 100 points, at which time the player with the lowest score wins.
In the 3-player variant, there's a dummy of 16 cards which aren't used during gameplay.
Relationship to Other Games
In the Western World, folks are pretty familiar with some broad types of card games.
Trick Taking games are perhaps the most common, and involve taking individual turns of cards in order to make a certain bid, avoid certain cards, or take certain cards. Bridge is the most well-known, but any number of games from Hearts to Euchre also qualify.
Hand Comparison games are ones in which players try and develop good hands in some manner, and a final comparison judges the winner. Poker in all its variants is the most obvious. Blackjack is ultimately a hand comparison game too.
Set Making games tend to involve combining cards together into runs and matches until you've organized your whole hand. The Rummy family of games are the best well-known here.
Much less common in the West are Card Matching games, in which cards recently played to the table interact in some fashion. In Uno the last card played constraints allowable plays, while in Cribbage a small set of recent card plays interact to determine scoring.
However, there are many other styles of card games out there, some of which you can find in the West, but others of which are mostly constrained to other parts of the world.
Gang of Four is a member of a family of Value Climbing card games, where play continues along an ascending ladder of card values until the top is reached; they tend to combine features of Set Making and Card Matching games, to look at them from a purely Western perspective.
If you'll forgive my French, Gang of Four falls into a subset of these games often called "asshole" variants or sometimes "Rich Man Poor Man". I've seen a traditional Chinese game called Tichu named as an ancestor. Wizards of the Coast's The Great Dalmutti and Dilbert: Corporate Shuffle are both close relatives of Gang of Four, though those two tend to emphasize fun and social interaction over strategy. Gang of Four is quite possibly one of the most strategic versions of the game.
Other Climbing games that are less closely related are Zheng Shangyou, Zheng Fou, Choi Dai Di, and Tien Len. Clearly, this particular type of card games originates in the Orient, and indeed Gang of Four proclaims "From the Streets of Hong Kong" on its box.
I find this page on National & Regional Card Games to be quite fascinating to see how different card games have evolved all over the world.
The Game Design
Straight card games don't tend to have a lot of moving pieces, and thus it's a bit harder not only to assess their game design, but really to mess them up. Generally, I'd say that card games can be measured on two levels: how fun are they to play; and how strategically can they be played.
Gang of Four is generally enjoyable. When I got done playtesting it, I actually wanted to play more, but we had other things scheduled for the day and so it was reluctantly put aside. I think some of the following factors tend to affect the "fun factor" of Gang of Four playing:
Short Turns: Generally, an individual round of cards plays out pretty quickly, and a whole game does as well. Thus, players having a bit of bad luck aren't stuck with it for too long, and instead can start a whole new game momentarily.
Complex Strategy Combined with Easy Plays: The complexity of Gang of Four is surprisingly high. You have to carefully judge every play to discern not only how many cards it'll get out of your hand, but also how it will affect future plays down the road. On the other hand, it's really easy to make knee-jerk plays in Gang of Four, where you just play the net highest card in the current sequence. Thus, it can be played at multiple levels of complexity, with beginners enjoying themselves and pros remaining interested. (And as you can see, this also answers my question on strategic play, which is "high, if you want it.")
Care Taken for Balance: One of my favorite little features of Gang of Four is that the order of play (clockwise or counter) reverses every round, to ensure that you're never right before or right after a particularly bad (or good) player. A nice balance idea, but admittedly hard to remember in gameplay. So Gang of Four takes care of that by listing the direction of play on each row on its score pad. That type of "hint" component is often forgotten in games, but appears here.
If you're looking for a new, traditional card game, without the additional complexity you might find in a board game or CCG, this looks like a winner in a nice package, and thus gets a "5" for substance.
Conclusion
I'm not entirely certain about the economics of selling card games that could be adapted to regular decks of cards. But then, I suppose, Uno's been doing it for decades. Gang of Four does a nice job of really creating an Oriental mood with the design of its cards, rules, and box. At $20, I expect any serious card players will get a more than fair return in fairly short order.
