In 1920’s Chicago Godfathers control Rival Gangs of Mobsters.
Send Mobsters to control areas of the city, muscle rival gangs out of your neighbourhood and collect protection money from city businesses.
Deploy mobsters together in order to stake your claim; recruit Hired Muscle; or make early sacrifices to turn the tables on your rivals later.
Protection Racket uses worker placement mechanics alongside area control. There are 100+ different ‘places’ on double-sided cards with just 9 (or 12 in a 3 or 4 player game) in each round. Some cards give immediate actions while some you want to control at the end of the round, but all require a majority to benefit, so players must balance these needs for every Mobster deployed.
The simple combat/sacrifice mechanic creates additional dilemmas. Removing an opponent’s pieces can be costly, as you lose the same number, but more importantly it can make you vulnerable to counter-attack by a third player. The safer play might be to choose to coexist, forcing a third player to commit more resources if they want to take control.
I have made Protection Racket available through Tabletop Simulator.
Hook
5 Challenging Choices in 5 minutes
- Deploy the same Mobsters to balance the benefits of immediate (worker placement) actions against need for end of round (area) control
- Coexist with rivals or both suffer losses in a mob war
- New card combinations and different rules for Hired Muscle every game
Every time the city is set up it creates new card combinations. Do you play early to take advantage of a combination your opponent hasn’t seen, or hold fire so you can respond to their every move?
Protection Racket creates lots of those ‘gotcha!’ and ‘ahaah!’ moments, and you soon realise that while there are many bad moves, there are almost as many good ones.
Mechanics
- worker placement; deploy 1 or many each turn
- area control; majority required to take action or claim revenue
- simple combat, with 1 for 1 sacrifice; but declaring a war is never required
- perfect information; nothing hidden
Components
21 Mobster meeples in 5 colours
50 Money tokens
54 (max) double-sided city cards
Rules sheet (2 sheets A4)
Protection Racket Rules v4
Protection Racket Sellsheet v2
The full Print and Play of Protection Racket prints out on about 13 sheets of A4 but the first 8 or so sheets are playable set ups of the game so that you can try the game with no cutting out required.
If you would like to experiment with the game further please get in touch. I can send you a spreadsheet which creates new randomised set ups of the game allowing new playable sets of cards to be printed or even played on a tablet or laptop screen.
Protection Racket PnP cards