First Impressions of The Godfather

Now, while the game pays lip service to the films, you won’t be spending much time with Don Corleone himself, unless you wake up with the box lid in your bed. Instead, you see it more from the thugs eye view, nameless characters fighting over street corners and shop fronts. For the honour of your family.

Honour, naturally, is measured in dollars. But only clean ones. Your nefarious activities will earn you money cards but only once they have been laundered, services available from certain spots in the city, can they be placed safely in your tin suitcase of end game scoring. The tins are great. I am pro tin.

To earn this money, you’ll need to be carefully playing out your workers to the main board. You have two types, the square based thugs that go rough up the shop fronts for a particular benefit, and the more sophisticated family members on round bases whose action spots lie on the intersection of two or more districts. When placed, they get access to the back room action of every shop in those regions. Extremely valuable!

On top of the usual worker placement issues, you must consider area control. At the end of each worker placement round, the player that has the most characters in a region gets to place a control marker in it, and the player with the most markers in a region earns that region’s protection money. It’s an extra wrinkle on top of worrying about how you are going to get the guns and boos you need to complete the next job you wanted to do.

Speaking of jobs, job cards give you little sub objectives to complete in return for money and a one use power. Many of these powers let you interact with the other player’s workers on the board, often with a Tommy gun or an explosive, dumping those workers into the river (don’t worry, everyone gets a full complement of workers for next round). But this lets you clear spaces you want to use, prevent enemies from taking control of regions. A well placed bullet can be fantastically effective. But you want to time this for when your opponents can’t take advantage of it, and this is where the different types of worker become most interesting. If some players have already used their family members, you know they can’t grab the corresponding space before it gets back to your turn! It’s really quite neat.

The Godfather felt like a mechanical game first and foremost. It is still worker placement, but running a mafia empire is going to be an economic endeavour. But aside from a few character cards you can bid on, I’m not sure there is anything uniquely Godfather about the whole thing. Fortunately the mechanical side of things was very enjoyable and the violent actions you can get involved in makes this a very interactive worker placement experience. It’s certainly got theme, but it felt general mafia more than The Godfather specifically.

 

This First Impressions post is based on a demo at the UK Games Expo.