La Famiglia: The Great Mafia Wars Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review La Famiglia: The Great Mafia war from Capstone Games. In La Famiglia, exactly 4 players are competing for the best mafia family in Italy.

I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse. No seriously, please don’t refuse it, we need exactly four players to play this game. I’m speaking of Capstone’s 2023 release, La Famiglia: The Great Mafia Wars by Maximilian Maria Thiel. In my quest to review only heavy 2-4 hour-long Euros that require exactly four players (see my recent review of Deal with the Devil), I signed my oath in blood to review La Famiglia for a few reasons.

It’s absolutely luscious artwork, the premise of a 2 vs. 2 area control game with a unique worker placement planning phase, and of course, as a Godfather/Goodfellas/Sopranos-head, Madonne, you better believe I was picking this one up like a box of cannolis out of the backseat of a car. So join me as we explore the island of Sicily, hire some goons, ride some speedboats, and bomb some cars.

At its heart, La Famiglia is a 2 vs. 2 area control game. The goal of the game is for your crime family to control 5 “mandamenti,” which is essentially a mafia fiefdom consisting of 3 contiguous regions, or for your team to control 6 mandamenti together.

The game is played over 4 rounds, each of which is split into 2 phases, with small management phases following each proper phase wherein control of said mandamenti is determined. The first phase is the planning phase, where players, using a rather ingenious system, place tokens to take specific actions, ranging from recruiting more soldiers to your headquarters (behind your screen), adding more soldiers to the board, acquiring boats, drug labs, or cars, gaining money from your drug labs, issuing orders for your soldiers to carry out on the map during the encounter phase, or upgrading your player board so your actions are more powerful, which also unlocks powerful new orders.

After the first management phase (which cannot trigger the end of the game,