26th June 2025 - Scarface: Bloody Business

• Recent games

Scarface 1920 is a deeply thematic game about Al Capone and the rest of the Chicago bootlegging gangs. I love immersive thematic games, particularly those about the lone renegades / entrepreneurial crooks (see also Merchants & Marauders, Western Legends, Trickerion etc.), so I've had it on my list to try for a long time.

Scarface 1920: Bloody Business, meanwhile, is the same as the original but with loads of extra stuff added in. I'd read through the rules of the base game and then watched a short video about how the expansion differs, which started and concluded with the presenter advising, "if you've not played Scarface before, you probably shouldn't start straight in with the expansion." But my word was my bond, and having got the expansion Ian was never likely to list just the base game again, so I gave it a go anyway.

I was in good company, with Ian the only one who remembered having played the base game before. A chaotic evening ensued, as the amount of stuff going on was always a step ahead of what I had grasped so far. I would say it's not a complicated game at heart, and the central gameplay mechanics flow very nicely when you've played a few turns (except on my turn, when somehow everything kept grinding to a halt...). There's just so much other stuff to think about.

To start with, you play as one of several thoroughly asymmetric gangs, which each have completely different strengths and weaknesses. After a while, you can probably stumble on a good strategy for your own gameplay, but figuring out how everyone else is doing is a challenge. Dan, Dave and I all played gangs from the base game, which I sort-of understood; but throughout the game I had absolutely no idea what Ian was doing with his gang. It seemed to involve lego bricks.

I was, as usual, late arriving at the club, and so found my two first-choice gangs already taken. Dan had taken Al Capone's gang, aka. The Outfit, which history suggests was a fairly successful gang. The other real-life Chicago gang featured in the game is the North Side Mob, led by Dean O'Banion - who is, as far as I can find out, the only historical person on Wikipedia to have his profession listed as "Gangster; Florist". (He was allegedly shot dead by Capone's gang while arranging some chrysanthemums.) Following my recent success at Barton In Bloom, I felt this would be a good one for me; but sadly Dave had taken that one. All of which left me with Arnold Rothstein, who I'd never heard of, but was in fact a real gang leader from New York that the game had transplanted into Chicago.

Thus equipped, we got started and face-planted straight into the swamp of confusion. It's basically an area control game with a bunch of ground troops that you move around a map of Chicago, and loads of different sorts of cards that control actions. I think Ian best summarised it by saying, "you just play through your deck and see what happens." Which jarred a bit, but if you can accept that a lot of the detail is really there for the theme rather than the mechanics, it works fine.

And no matter how well you know the game, it must always feel chaotic and somewhat random. The right card, coming up at just the right (or wrong) time, can cause an enormous change in the outcome of the game. Those of you who've played Merchants & Marauders will recall how it can turn completely against you on the roll of a dice. When Ian played his "take all your money" card (paraphrasing slightly) on me, it felt like I'd been sunk.

But unlike Merchants & Marauders, at least in this case, there seemed to be enough balancing mechanisms to allow me to come back. And the movement mechanics meant I was always most likely to come back against the player who attacked me in the first place. So Ian and I ended up in a suitably thematic turf war. This enhanced my "strategy", in that it progressed from complete guesswork to - anytime I had the cards to do it - attacking Ian.

Meanwhile, with great historical accuracy, the game was won by Al Capone and the Outfit, by virtue of their successful strategy of not getting attacked by anyone - not even the police. Ian and I agreed that we might have both been better off just leaving each other alone and getting on with making money. So Johnny Torrio was onto something with his crime syndicate idea after all.

It took a while to sink in, but by the time I got home I realised I loved this game. It might have been better for me to start with the base game, but even with the confusion I really enjoyed it. And there are lots of elements to the Bloody Business expansion that I wouldn't want to do without: the Candidates bit made end-game scoring far more of a challenge to predict, and the random police power card (I can't remember what it was called) made the game far more interesting and unique. And some of the most fun cards in the main decks came from the expansion too.

We played a shortened version on the (correct) expectation that we'd have no idea what we were doing and so take ages. I can see this game could surely finish to full-length within an evening if everyone knows it beforehand, and it'd also be good for a games day. Either way, I'm hoping I'll get a chance to play again soon.

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