by Justin Bell

Hell of a Deal was hot the entire four days of Gen Con a few weeks ago. It was so hot that the game’s publisher, Smirk & Dagger, sold out almost immediately on the show’s first day. This was doubly impressive because the game wasn’t tracking as high on BGG’s own Gen Con preview.

The booth was so jammed each time I walked by, it looked like the publisher’s owner and “Chief Instigator,” Curt Covert, had offered guests actual cash winnings to stand around the booth’s demo tables. (What say you, Curt?)

Hell of a Deal stayed so hot throughout the show that Covert sent members of his team to an offsite warehouse (do we even need to guess where this faraway warehouse was?) on the second day of Gen Con to retrieve more product…and then, that second drop of games sold out on the show’s third day.

When you’re hot, you’re hot!

Many, many hundreds of people bought a game about poker—to the tune of its $75 MSRP—in a year where I thought poker wasn’t nearly as hot as it had been in years past. Hell of a Deal was the classic example of a “con” game, a convention title that served as a winner both because of its gameplay and because of the walk-up business it offered. Poker is such an increasingly familiar product to both hobby and non-hobby gamers alike.

Last week, while I was prepping both this article and my upcoming review of Hell of a Deal over at Meeple Mountain, I fired up the Xbox to play Balatro, the poker-with-powers rogue-like video game that gets love from time to time when I’m not working through other rogue-likes such as Brotato, Dead Cells (the video game, not the board game), and Slay the Spire (again, the video game, not the board game).

I don’t play poker in real life, but I do enjoy a quick game of Balatro. Or four games of Balatro. Often, I look up, realize that I wanted to do “a quick game of Balatro”, then discover that it is 1:47 AM on a school night.

I think this is part of the allure of poker-themed board/card games right now, even if the sample size is relatively small: the hook and the gameplay loop are very, very simple to grasp. I was really surprised—borderline shocked—by the number of crowds I saw standing near the Hell of a Deal demo tables all Gen Con weekend long, full of observers who didn’t seem like they had any interest in lining up to actually try the game.

Certainly, many of those observers bought Hell of a Deal…games don’t buy themselves (yet). However, those observers seemed very interested in simply watching other players work together to play poker.

I pulled some numbers from the interwebs. The World Series of Poker’s 2026 main event ended a few weeks ago, with a kid from Spokane, Washington netting $10,000,000 for a first-place finish. That’s cool, but I was more intrigued by some of the WSOP viewing numbers…378 MILLION impressions on socials, with players in this year’s tourney hailing from more than a hundred different countries. More than 70 countries registered a total north of 300 million views of the tournament; I still have dozens of friends in the US who watch poker on TV.

Like many of you, I played the KOSMOS release The Gang when it was released a couple years ago. I was enthralled by the chance to play cooperative poker with friends in my gaming groups. I don’t gamble, so poker in a safe space was music to my ears, and The Gang’s hook of silently influencing the table with those star-laden hint chips kept us coming back over and over again.

A couple years prior to that, I reviewed the Gamelyn release Tiny Epic Western. It had a nice mix of cowboy-themed worker placement and poker-style hand management, and for a guy who wasn’t a Texas hold ‘em player, Tiny Epic Western has a nice array of training wheels to guide peasants like me who don’t play poker at all.

I played the heck out of Ace of Spades last year—and again, earlier this year, when the Ace of Spades expansion Call of the Zombie arrived on my doorstep—and found that I might have an addiction to solo poker attack games, regardless of platform.

(Uhh, no…I certainly have not played Ace of Spades on Board Game Arena a dozen times…or, eh, maybe more. Ha, it’s hard to keep track, but it’s encouraging to see that I’m not the only one to enjoy the sweet, sweet taste of just one more run.)

Which brings us back to Hell of a Deal.

Between a demo play, a surprisingly easy-to-administer solo play, and a four-player game with the folks from my review group, I can see why Hell of a Deal was both a fun “con” game and a keeper outside of the convention environment. I didn’t think I needed more poker-themed board games than the titles I named above, but Hell of a Deal challenged that notion immediately.

Co-op poker clearly sings to me, if The Gang is any indication. But a game like Hell of a Deal that encourages cheating? Like, you need to cheat to win, and the cheating is built into the game’s design because you have to outcheat a cheater?

Count me in.

Designer Cameron Reid and the team at Smirk & Dagger have come up with a nice formula here. First, players love bling, so while Hell of a Deal could have probably been just fine with cardboard player mats and plastic tokens, Reid & Co. knew this wouldn’t fly with players. So, neoprene is everywhere. Poker chips? Certainly. And it’s great that those chips can be shoved into a betting area on each player’s personal board (whoops, personal neoprene mat!!), and the chips have the appropriate amount of heft.

Tarot-sized boss cards are a nice touch, with silly boss names like Dedly Aloor and Nick Hauss waiting to torment the players. There are powerful favor cards and equally distressing curse cards to add variety and challenge. Players can swap hand cards with other players or grab cards from the discard pile to make average hands sexier…all with the aim of cheating just enough to play a hand better than the current round’s boss character.

Hell of a Deal is a poker game, evolved from some of the other poker-themed board games I’ve tried before. It leans into poker’s growing global footprint by catering to both seasoned poker players and folks who have never played poker before. I was encouraged by my Gen Con demo, a four-player table that included three people who know poker and one who never plays. The co-op elements made the “newb” comfortable in a way that other games may not have, making it fun to watch their reactions to the proceedings and their general appreciation for the game.

Here was the wild part: looking around to see the number of people who stood around during our nearly hour-long demo to simply watch us play poker. People who were curious because it was poker on the table, a game that has become so approachable that people around the world continue to casually watch poker online or on TV.

Trick-taking games have exploded in the last few years; according to a search I ran here on BGG, there are about 3,200 games that feature trick-taking as a mechanic…and more than 800 of those were released in just the last three years. I wonder if poker will catch fire in a similar way, where we find ourselves drowning in an avalanche of other poker-themed titles.

I won’t go all-in on that idea just yet, though. It’s clear that poker is hot!