La Famiglia: The Great Mafia War

La Famiglia is a little unusual. It is a game for exactly four players (like mahjong!), and it is played in teams of two. You are mafia families in Sicily, and you compete to control the most regions. You win immediately when you control 5 regions, or your team controls 6 regions. If no one achieves this after four rounds, the team controlling more regions wins. 

Every region on the map has three spaces. You need to control two out of three spaces to control a region. On the map the cubes are your gangsters. You can build drug factories which help you make money and boost your defence. You have cars which help you in offense. You have boats that give you mobility to attack more distant spaces. 

Every round consists of a planning phase and an execution phase. Two planning boards are used in the planning phase. There are player discs and neutral discs on one board, and on your turn you must move one to the other board. The space you move it to determines the action you get to perform, for example earning money, recruiting gangsters, deploying gangsters, buying cars and placing order tiles. Depending on whose disc you move and the space you move it to, there may be costs involved. This mechanism is actually worker placement but a little more elaborate. 

In the execution phase you reveal order tiles that have been placed on the map during the planning phase, and you execute them. This is when attacks take place. Not all order tiles are for attacking. Some are for defending. Fighting involves no dice. Being the attacker you can choose to use a brute force approach to resolve the attack, which is deterministic. However if you want to achieve better results, e.g. losing fewer people in the process, you can take a gamble and play a little mind game. This involves players playing cards face down and then they choose how to apply the opponent's card - to the opponent or to themselves. The end result might be better, or it can also be worse than using brute force.

Every player has a player board. One of the things you can do is to remove discs from your player board. This upgrades your abilities, for example making your car bombs more destructive. When you improve beyond certain thresholds, you unlock new order tiles that are better than the basic ones you start with. Notice that the families in the games are a little different. They have different advanced order tiles. 

When you control regions, you enjoy special bonuses, for example, allowing you to recruit more gangsters. You can choose these bonuses but you need to coordinate this with your partner because you can’t both take the same one. These region bonuses allow you to customise your play.

This is generally a dudes on a map game, an area control game. You have to manage two important resources - money and gangsters. You attack, you defend. You do your best to control regions. There are neutral pieces on the map. In our game, I didn’t attack them much, because the other team was the bigger threat to me. In hindsight I should not have taken such a simplistic approach. After all, the goal is region control, not killing enemies. This is almost a perfect information game. The main uncertainties are the order tiles which are placed face-down, and the little mind game you can choose to play when you attack. There is much strategising and planning you can do. The game is confrontational. It is also calculative due to how deterministic most of the game is. The art is colourful, but make no mistake. This is a pretty serious game. 

I first saw the game at Essen 2024, and it's pretty!