Review: Nostra City:: A Review a Week #24: My search for the ultimate organized crime themed game continues, but this came close.: "
by UndeadViking
And we are back for another installment of “A Review a Week”. If you have no clue what I am doing here, this is my attempt to review every single game in my collection. By now I realize that this is pure folly on my behalf to even think that I am going to succeed at this, but I am having a good time writing these, and at least I am able to give a little back to the community that has given me so much. But enough back patting and glad handing, let’s get on with it! As always, each and every game in my collection has been purchased by me, or was a gift from a friend or family member.
Now I, like a lot of people, have a fascination with the idea and the existence of organized crime. I have watched Godfather 1 and 2 about 100 times each, along with tons of other mob movies, like Goodfellas, State of Grace, and a huge personal favorite, Miller’s Crossing. I am also one of the few people in this world that didn’t mind the ending to the Soprano’s. I have tried to find both computer and video games that would satisfy my gangster cravings, and of course, I search for the ultimate “mafia” board game. When I heard about Nostra City, my interests rose. I threw it into a recent order I had with Boulder Games and got it to the table pretty soon after. My group was very taken with the theme, the components, and most of all, the gameplay. We played it several times on different evenings, and it is a good game, but it lacks that last little bit to push it into greatness, but before I get too far ahead of myself, let’s get on with the review.
Overview and ComponentsNostra City is a game for 3-5 people in which they take on the roles of mob captains, with wiseguys at their disposal, and areas of turf to exploit. You are in competition with the other captains to try and rig the jury of the Godfather’s upcoming trial, but you also must make sure you have the most “respect” (i.e. points) at the end of the game, so when the Godfather is found innocent, he retires and leaves control of the mob in your hands. As a twist, there is also a chance that one or two of the people playing could become a mob informant, in which case they want the Godfather to be found guilty, so they can turn states evidence and then avoid prison and go into the witness protection program.
At its heart, Nostra City is a semi-cooperative game with equal parts card management, auction/bidding, and negotiation. Components wise you get a nice looking game. The board is a little small but it serves its purpose. The cards are crisp and have some nice art on them, but they may be a little too graphic for small children. The money in the game is represented by the ubiquitous small cards that are prevalent in games nowadays. I know you are probably sick of hearing me complain about these, but I don’t like small cards. I have big hands and I always feel like I am dropping them or going to crush them. You get a handful of wooden tokens, one for each player to track their score, and a couple others to track the current state of the jury, and the month or turn that the game is on. Nothing about the components really jumped out at me, but everything works and nothing is a distraction, which is good enough for me.
How do you play?This game is ridiculously easy to learn and teach, and you can definitely 'learn as you go' the first time you bring it to the table. I suggest reading through the rules at least once before so the flow of the game will come naturally for you, but if you don’t care about the first session taking a little extra time, just dive in.
Start by dealing each person three random wiseguys and one turf from the “Street” deck. Once you have done this, mix up all the street cards into one deck and deal out the the first four cards that will be up for auction in the first month. These could be turfs, wiseguys, or respect cards that are worth points towards determining the winner of the game.
So you are looking over the cards that you want to try and add to your collection, but before you can do that, you have to make some money to help you purchase the cards on the street. To do this, you must “busy” out one of your wiseguys, and then busy out one of your turfs. Most turfs will have a color and a symbol on them. You can choose to activate either of those options. Once you pick what you are activating, look at all the turf cards in front of all of the players. For each color or symbol that matches what you are activating, you get to draw one money card from the deck. Now here is the rub – for each money card you drew because of your opponents turf, you have to pay them off in kind. For example, if you activated the color blue, and the person to your right has two blue turfs, you get two extra money cards, but you have to give two of them to that person – or you can cheat them.
Cheating a person allows you to keep some if not all of the money that normally would have gone to your opponents. There is nothing they can do to stop this, however, when you cheat a player they get to draw a vendetta card for every payoff you failed to give them. Vendetta cards are a way that other players can mess with you and your gang. They can take away some of your respect (and your points), whack one of your wiseguys, steal money and turf from you, and many other things. Basically, it allows them to get even.
Now once you have made all the money you can, you move on to the auction and bidding portion of the game. There will normally be four items up for bid on the board. Each player has four auction cards, one for each location on the board. In order to bid on an item, you need to have a wiseguy available. Make a wiseguy busy, and put the auction card on top of them face down with the money from your bank that you are offering up. Once everyone has placed all the bids that the can and want to place, everyone reveals what they were after and how much they spent. If you happen to be the only one who bid on a certain item, well good news, you can go through your offer, pick the smallest value bill you were willing to spend, and purchase it for just that amount. If you tied someone else, both of you get nothing AND you have to spend all your money as well. Obviously, if you offered up the most money, you win the card. If you lost the bid, you still have to spend the money you offered up, so don’t try to lowball too many bids, or else you will just end up with no money and nothing to show for it. If you go through this phase and made at least one bid and did NOT get anything, you can draw a vendetta card for your troubles.
The final phase before you go onto the next turn (or month as it is called in the game) is the jury tampering phase. Anyone who has a wiseguy free can now busy them out and place a money card in a corruption pile. Any money card worth 10,000 or more will have either a positive or negative value on it. This signifies which direction you are trying to sway the jury, positive meaning innocent and negative meaning guilty. Now why would anyone spend money to make the jury vote guilty?
Well buried in the Vendetta deck are two mob informant cards. Each of these cards, when drawn, make the player who has them become a snitch for the government and they start working for the other side. They still take part in every aspect of the game, but they now have to make sure that the Godfather is found guilty so they don’t go to prison themselves. While there is no way you can be positive who is on which side, I have found that just watching the person who was in a big hurry to collect vendetta cards early is usually the one trying to send me up the river.
After all of those segments of the game are said and done, you refresh all of your turfs and wiseguys, move the turn tracker one step on the board, populate the street with four new cards, and start fresh with the money making phase of the game. You continue this way until the end of the third turn where you pick up the corruption pile, shuffle it, and go through each card to find out where you are at as far as the jury goes. Once you have adjusted the jury token, shuffle the corruption money back into the main money deck and start a new corruption pile on the next turn.
Play now continues until the end of the sixth turn where you total up the corruption pile again to find out if the Godfather is going to be set free or if he is going to send his captains to prison to save his own hide. This is also the time to declare if you are a government snitch or not. Once you know which side is going to win, either the loyal mob members or the turncoats, the player with the most points wins the game.
My opinionWell I am not going to tell you that I don’t enjoy playing Nostra City, as a matter of fact I have enjoyed it a great deal. First of all the theme is awesome. Who hasn’t fantasized about running the mob? Every single time we have played it, quotes from all of our favorite movies are thrown back and forth across the table and numerous awful Marlon Brando impersonations are attempted. It’s fun to say “this payoff feels a little light Vinny” in a bad Italian accent when you are cheated, and of course, swearing revenge while trying to emulate your inner De Niro.
Even if the game stank it would still be fun because of those reasons, but the mechanics and gameplay themselves are actually quite interesting and innovative as well. Sure, we have seen blind bids in games before, but they are still fun. I like how you have to weigh your options with making sure you have enough wiseguys to complete everything you want to achieve in a given turn. The risk analysis of either paying your opponents the cash you owe them, making them stronger, or risking them getting a damaging vendetta card is always one that you have to consider.
I especially like the possibility of one or more of your opponents turning on you in the middle of the game. While Nostra City doesn’t do this quite as well as other games with traitor players (Battlestar Galactica and Shadows over Camelot come to mind) it is a nice twist that you must endure every time you see someone putting another stack of cash in the corruption pile during the final phase of the turn.
However, I mentioned that Nostra City lacks the final push to make it a great game. There are parts of the game that just don’t click with me. For starters, it is very easy for a single player to become the sad sack of the game. They don’t get a turf or a wiseguy during the first auction, they are stuck making next to no money, and they have no ability to bid against the people that have the money and resources to keep themselves in the lead. You basically have to hope and pray for a good vendetta card or two to even the odds, but that is not extremely likely. Once you are in the hole, it is tough to dig yourself out.
Next, while the theme is fun and the feeling of running a “crew” is very prevalent, there are a lot of things about the Mafia that I wish had been included in the game but they are just not there. I want to intimidate other crime families, I want to have turf wars in the streets! I don’t want to wait to get a vendetta card before I can kill off an opponents wise guy, I just want to shoot him and dump his body in the drink! I realize you can’t just have open chaos in a game like this, but I sometimes feel like my hands are tied and my options are restricted when a true mob captain could probably allow themselves a little levity.
Another way I feel hamstrung is that the only way you can really interact with the other players is via Vendetta cards, and even then, some of them don’t have any direct effect on your opponents. As stated before, if you are in a hole, it is tough to dig yourself out, the other side of the coin would be if you have one opponent that is the runaway leader. Once they start making their cash and collecting good card after good card, it becomes very difficult to drag them back down to your level. Simply put, the game has a few scaling issues that need to be worked out. I am sure, given a little time and creativity, most groups would be able to come up with some house rules to alter this, but frankly you shouldn’t have to.
Finally, the game has a lot of sameness to it after the first handful of plays. There just aren’t enough cards in the deck to allow enough variety from session to session. For example, in a five player game, you are going to burn through your vendetta deck at least once, maybe twice depending on how cutthroat your opponents are. Also, with only a handful of wise guy cards in the game (each made man has a particular power that will help you) you will find yourself losing the immersion that made the game fun to begin with, and instead you will find you and your friends counting cards, determining percentages, and most of all, worrying about the nuts and bolts of the game instead of just relaxing and letting the game be fun. If they could somehow double the number of cards in the game it would be more random and fresh, and have a longer lifespan for game groups, or at least mine for that matter. Maybe an expansion will address this at a later date.
All those negatives aside however, Nostra City is a very solid game, and is actually a rather affordable game. I think I picked my copy up for around $25 online, and at that price point, you are getting a lot of game for the investment. Suffice it to say,
you will enjoy Nostra City if you want a game that will be quick to learn and even easier to play, where you can spend an hour or so trying to outthink your opponents, screwing them over whenever you can, while watching your own back to try and keep them from doing the same to you. If you happen to be a fan of mobster movies, you can double the enjoyment you will receive, just be prepared to let it sit on your shelf for a while between plays so it will remain a fresh experience for you.
Reactions from my game group:
”I like it. It makes me think but it doesn’t make me agonize over my choices. The bidding portion of the game is probably my favorite part” – Jason
”Man, this game is fun. Let me know when you play it again, I want another chance at taking the rest of you down!” – Brad
”I wouldn’t play this every week, but it is a nice change of pace. I like how with the government snitch a person in last place could possibly pull off a win if they get lucky.” - Craig"
anyone else got any particular favourites?
