How do I get myself in to these situations?This one came about, as so many of them do, in the Roleplaying Club in Blackheath. I'd brought along a few games, but Pat had some too. This one, Kings of Chicago, reminded me and Paul of an old PC game Gangsters, that was absolutely brilliant as a concept though I found the game very difficult and rarely got very far. So I decided to give it a go, joined by Pat, Mel and Chris's brother Doug.
So how does this game work? You're chasing 'Power Points, which can be obtained by opening businesses in the city, having the most influence, or conducting mob jobs. You do this by driving around Chicago in a car, opening businesses if you have enough resources, shooting out anyone who tries to stop you, and every so often the resources, events and opportunities get updated. Details on exactly who has what are kept secret in a separate folder, one for each player which is a nice touch indeed.
That's how you win the game. However with four of us playing, it became a game of how do we stop the other guys from getting too far ahead? Example: Pat systematically clawed his way up to 7 power points largely by opening businesses. He was comfortably ahead of the rest of the crowd until I opened a level 3 business - which is basically as good as it gets - and caught up with him, also at 7 points. At this point, I only needed to complete a job and open a level 2 business in order to win, which was never far from my grasp. So the other players had to do what they can to stop me: Using the police to bust my jobs, attacking my business, using events to steal my resources. We didn't make this easy for each other.
So what do I think of the game? A good one, in all. The system is as good as it needs to be; there were no 'What the hell just happened?' moments and it was all pretty clear exactly what does what, and in what order. The only slight ambiguity that I didn't like was the fact that the cars move in squares based on how much you can roll on 1D6. I don't know what this purports to represent exactly, as at some point you're going to roll all 1s in one phase and by no stretch of the imagination should it take you 4 turns to get to the end of the road. This did happen on a number of occasions. However, this comes across to me as a necessary evil - you'd either have to use a specialist dice (not actually all that common,) or increase the size of the game to take 2D6 which nobody wants because it's a pretty decent size as it is. Is the experience representative of gangsters in Chicago? Well it's a board game, so in of itself probably not - but when we were playing, there were insults, threats, lots of "are you talkin' to me?!" backstabbing, loansharking, underhanded tactics and a ferocious struggle for power, so actually it's likely not all that far off. It's a good environment to trade that sort of thing and being role players, we were more than happy to get into the role of vicious gangsters.
Who won in the end? Well, Pat reckoned we'd have the game wrapped up in about an hour. This was at 8:30 and we were still playing 3 hours later, in a huge power struggle that could go either way and we hadn't got a hope of finishing before the club closed. So we counted up how many power points we all had, and we came up with the following:
In 4th place was Doug, who'd started off neatly enough but had some very bad luck with the driving and in the end his tactics looked like he was scavenging off the other players, which wasn't really working very we;ll for him. I'm pretty sure he ended with 3 points.
In 3rd place was Mel. He again suffered from bad dice rolls but used the opportunities to exert power over the city by taking over the most territory. The result was that he almost always had the police in his pocket and the extra power point awarded for having the largest territory; none of the rest of us had a hope of catching him up on that one. He had a lot of money but only a few businesses to show for it, which cost him in the end with 5 points.
In joint first with 7 points a piece were Pat and me. Pat had got a steady hold on a lot of the small businesses and built up a veritable army of gangsters which were working well for him, as we were never going to be able to affect this significantly. If he lost 1 business, he could just open another one quite easily. I'd done the most jobs and got a fair number of gangsters, but what really set me in the runnings was the level 3 business I'd opened, which continued to remain open despite Doug's best efforts to shut it down. This was a bit of a risk - if he'd managed it, the balance of power would have shifted very quickly, and my hopes for victory depended on keeping that business operational - but in the end it paid off, another half an hour and I'd have got it, I reckon. Having a gangster with the driving skill helped as well.
Thoroughly enjoyed it, probably won't play it again as it's not a new game and isn't for sale on Amazon so if I want it I'll have to chase obscure copies. But if you do happen across one and you're looking for a not-so-friendly evening in with a few friends, you could do far worse than this.
See you next time!
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