‘Eliminate your rivals, be the last one standing to win!’
'The aim of the game is to take out the rival crime bosses and regain control of your town. For as long as they're alive, you're not running the show anymore. It's time to get out the heavies and start occupying locations, taking out the enemy associates and eliminating your rivals. Achieve success by eliminating rival bosses at every available opportunity . To get your rivals, you have to remove their associates first.’
3 words to describe this game: warfare, domination, family
Theme: Gangster warfare!! Love the concept of becoming a boss of a crime family and trying to take control of the town! We don’t have any gangster games in our collection unless you count something like Colt Express and so this theme is intriguing.
Gameplay:
Starting with associates on your family card, your job is to occupy locations and attack your rival crime family. The more locations you occupy, the more perks you get but be careful not to push your luck as you may just draw attention to yourself from the FBI!
On each turn, you can draw cards, occupy locations, move associates or attack rival families. You have to know when to push your luck with the cards and when to shore up your location by moving associates in to protect your assets. You have to read the room and anticipate what your rivals will do next making sure that you don’t make the wrong move and leave yourself open to attack ending with your associates ending up in hospital or worse!
Components:
Cards: Really clean and sleek, nice feel in the hand. Loved the mug shots of real crime associates and the little write up about them underneath. Was a great touch to have this real life element to the game.
Dice: Tiny dice, in keeping with the size of the blocks used to denote associates
Cubes: These do the job of representing the associates within the game, colours are easy to distinguish between. For me, my personal preference would have been for the associates to have been meeples but that just would have been to do with aesthetics and really immersing yourself in the game. The cubes totally suffice for the job they are meant to do and I completely understand the need to keep things small so they all fit well into the box.
Overall thoughts:
Such a compact game, easy to transport as a travel game or to take over to a game night at other people’s houses all housed in a sleek looking box. This game is for adults or older teenagers due to the theme of the game.
In a saturated market of card games would this be one I would pick up and play again and again. In game play, there were some reasons why we should put it down and not pick it up again (mainly because in our first 2 games the FBI wiped out our associates straight away - that’s probably more to do with us than the game), and there are things that I think would make gameplay a bit more interesting for two players, but there is definitely something about this game that feels interesting and different. The fact that it’s a card game but involves worker placement is a neat idea and something I haven’t seen much of in the way of card games. It’s usually about building a deck of hands or placing cards in certain ways to create a chain events but this game is different in that it has these two components to it. Something draws me back and I can feel each time we’ve played that I’ve just tried to get more out of the game and be more strategic. I think that this game is better with a higher play count but there is definitely something that pulls you back in.
Is it annoying when you set up the whole game and you immediately win over your opponent? Yes!
However, this doesn’t put me off cos it just means you get to play another game and the victory is that much sweeter when you do battle it out.
And much like real life, I guess two rival gangster families could take each other out easily or over a long drawn out battle of cat and mouse with each trying to outwit the other until there is too much bloodshed and then ultimately one overpowers the other.
It’s intriguing and I think I want to play this more, with a higher play count. It’s one that makes you think and strategise but also revolves around some luck of cards. It’s got something about it that makes you want to bring it back to the table.
This Preview is based on a 2 player game and I will update this when I get this to the table for a higher player count.The kickstarter is due in March 2022 make sure you follow Mayfly games to keep up to date with the latest information.
Thank you to Mayfly games for providing the copy of the game for Preview.