Poker Night 2 review: On the table

In both variants, your goal is to make the best five-card hand using cards you're dealt and a set of community cards on the table. Each player makes bets on their hand — and what they imagine everyone else's hands to be — and the player with the best hand wins. A quick cheat sheet is included for players who are unfamiliar with the rules, but it certainly helps to know the basics of poker before jumping in.

Telltale encourages continued play through a system of collectibles and awards. You win tokens for besting everyone in tournaments, which you can use to purchase chipsets and table themes from the various franchises. You'll get extra tokens for completing "bounty" objectives like winning a showdown with a better kicker, or stealing a hand on the flop. Typically, you'll have three bounty tasks assigned at a time, then, once you complete those, you'll have the opportunity to win a special item – the Necronomicon from Ash or Claptrap's 2012 Spike VGA award, for example.

Poker itself is a deep game reliant upon players' ability to "read" others; to guess their hands and detect subterfuge and strategy. Poker Night 2's detailed and nuanced animation is integral to the metagame. You play your hand, but you need to watch each character for their "tells" — twitchy eyes, nervous looks etc. — to guess at their cards and to detect whether or not they're bluffing. This gets more obvious if you buy them drinks using your tokens. A character who has had an adult beverage will show off his tells more often. The subtle cues afforded by the animation help alleviate the fact that video game poker is a simple but appreciated approximation of real-life poker's best feature — the psychology of playing with other people.

Poker Night 2's main appeal is its cast The table seats Sam from Telltale's own Sam and Max series (Max quips from the sidelines), Brock Samson from The Venture Brothers, Ash from The Evil Dead and Army of Darkness and Claptrap from Borderlands, who is amusing, but clearly the runt of the litter. GLaDOS (from Portal) is the laconic dealer and easily my favorite part of the game, snapping off thinly veiled insults at the table with abandon.