 It's time to talk about not good critters, which we also played, but La Cosa Nostra, a 2014 board game that is relatively new to us. I played it a couple of times. I played it one time. Then we got Scott to play it. It's pretty good. Yeah, we got a friend who really likes mafia themed games and mafia stuff in general. I like mafia thing, but I don't really like mafia things. Right. I just I regular like mafia things hiding in the stove. But yeah, so this game, the way the fundamental concept is that you're a mob boss and there are other mob bosses. And you got people in your mob because that's what a mob is. You get some drug dealers. You got some fences. You got some, I don't know. Oh, no, it's working down just as I'm trying to do the show. You got some hit man. You know, you got all the kinds of no, you got all the kinds of like the no do gooders that you would have in your mafia crime squad. Right. But you can only have so many bad dudes, right? Working for you. Everyone else is bad dudes working for them too. You can hire more dudes with money. Sure. But you got jobs you need to do to get money. And each job requires a set of dudes. So it's like, oh, to do this job. I need a nightclub. I need a pimp. And I need a shitload of drugs. Right. So it's like, I only have a nightclub. Hey, rim, can I have your pimp? I need his help to do some work. Hey, Joe, can I borrow your night your your drug dealer? And my response might be, yes, Scott, you can use my pimp at some point in the future. If you will let me at an undetermined point use your loan shark. Yep. But my response might also be, you know what, fuck you. In fact, give me four thousand dollars. I'm going to kill all the other pimps on the table. I will let you use my nightclub. But I understand that you are using my nightclub for a very lucrative party. You will have to give me half the revenues of the party that occurs in my nightclub. How about, how about I'll just give you a six grand cash right now? That tells me that the party you are going to do in my nightclub is going to make you more than twelve thousand dollars. So now I wanted him even more. Yep. So we say we make our deal and we're like, our deal is fine. We're both going to make a lot of money. Then it's our friend, Joey Jujer's turn. He's like, Raymond Scott, you both have to give me five grand or I'm fucking killing Scott's pimp right now. Yeah, you can kill people. Yep. And then the job won't happen. And the game is pretty like we're not going to go through the rules because the game is actually pretty complex and has a lot of phases. But it's not complex to play. The complexity just makes the game work because everything happens. You just keep going clockwise sequentially. And first you're taking your mobsters and some of them are smart and some of them are kind of shitty. Yeah. And they make money for you. Yeah. So you got some mobsters and every turn it comes to your turn all all around it comes to your turn. And all you do is you put a mobster down and you say, smiley two face is doing this job. And you put the mobster face up and the job face down. And then it goes around again. You say, Tommy two toes is doing this other job. You put the job face down. And some of them are better than others. Yeah. So one job might be like somebody. So the job of the like five gun strength super mobster, right? The guy in the white suit, he's doing the most important job. Yeah. But the job that the one gun guy is doing is probably like some lame old job. Some of the jobs are public. Like I might put Joey Jojo Shabadu down as one gun mobster and be like, he's just buying that nightclub legit. He is buying this for I sent him out to go buy a nightclub. That's all he's doing. He's Johnny. Can't fuck this one up. He's going to buy he's he's buying a pimp. Like there's a new pimp in town. We're going to buy him. Get him. Get him into first. But he's going to buy a caravan from some but the jobs might be things like this job will pay out 20 grand, but you need a nightclub and a senator and a shitload of cocaine. Yeah, you need like the jobs that pay out a lot. The requirements are big. So the way to win this game is to get lots and lots of people to agree to do things with you. Right. Like if I make a deal with Ram and I make a deal with every other player, like one deal with each other player. I'm now doing four deals. I'm making bank, right? You want to get as many things to execute as possible and you got to look at who's winning and you you can just direct screwing right in terms of murdering people. So you look at who's winning and you target their shit. So it doesn't happen and make sure that you're the person who successfully executes the most deals. But everything is all that matters at the end of the game is how much money all you want at the end is money. Everything is transactual. Just mobster wins. Well, you do get some bonuses for if you still have all your mobster, they turn into money though. Yeah, everything turns into money. And for mobsters, you have killed. Yep. So you get there's a little bit of an extra incentive to kill some people toward the end, because ostensibly, if you have more mobsters alive and you've killed other mobsters, it makes your mob in like a better position. It's also a side effect. Like if you've done if you're if you're in the position where you've killed more and have your guys killed less, you've probably completed more jobs. Oh, yeah. So done more stuff. So like some jobs are like whack, like literally just kill some some other mobster. Some of them are like bust somebody up, like bust up someone else's pimp. Yes. So they're like that. They're out of commission, but then they come back. Yeah. So here's a specific job. Senators party. This is what I was thinking of. It'll pay out if you get two successes, 24 grand. Yeah, there's a little bit of randomness going on. If you get one, but you can mitigate that randomness by putting the better mobsters on something or like putting a henchman down. Yeah, you roll more dice. Yeah. If it if it's only one success, 18 grand. But you need a politician, a nightclub, a pimp and a drug dealer. All the things you need for the senator's party. It's very thematic. Like the theme of this game is a plus. Yeah. So you go around putting all your guys on the jobs and then you go around again, executing the jobs. So I might I might have a job that when I trigger it, thought I need a nightclub and a pimp. What if I don't trigger that job right away on Scott's turn? He just murders the pimp. Uh oh. Now my job is going to fail if I trigger the mobster. Now I'm going to make a deal to get another pimp in a hurry. So if you're going to do the senator's party, which is worth a lot of money, you're going to want to do that when you're going to go first. So you can do it before anyone kills the senator. So a lot of games that have this, like, a sidereal confluence, let's say, where you can just make binding deals with everybody all the time forever. They tend to bog down in the dealmaking phase. Yep. This game avoids that because every player takes a short, simple action and you just keep going around and going around and going around and going around. That's a nice modern design there. No weight, no weight in constant doing. Game doesn't feel long. But it also means that negotiations will happen when they're relevant. I might make a deal in advance. I might make deals. You're usually only making a deal relevant to if it's relevant to the one simple action you're about to take. Yep. Or I have a deal in my hand and during the before it's time to put out the deals. That's what I'm like. Well, I want to make this deal happen this turn. I'm missing these two things. Let's see who has those two things. I'm going to try to deal with those two things. Yep. So the player whose turn it is to do their action is likely to be making the more urgent deals and capturing the attention to whoever they need. But simultaneously, if Joey Jojo has taken a long time on his turn because it's a complicated turn or he's negotiating a big deal, me and Scott on the side might just talking about start talking about like, hey, let's trade pimp for pimp for the future. Like things like that. Mm hmm. The mechanic of the deals is really elegant too. The if you want to use someone's thing, you get the right to put a deal marker on that thing. The other player can't renege on that deal. You know, nor like I can use that pimp for whatever I want. Right. It's like rim says, OK, you can put your marker on my pimp. I put the marker on his pimp. Now that means I can use it once and remove the token. But now everyone else when they're like killing, they look around the board and they see like a pimp with like three tokens on it. They're like, I guess I'm killing that pimp. Yep. Unless everybody pays me. That's going to kill like mess up three other people's plans. Yep. So it's it's on the one hand. It's like a good mechanic, but it's also a great indicator and really mess with people's heuristics. You don't want to like, do I really want to ask Grim if I can borrow his pimp if it already has a marker from someone else on it? No. Right. That's going to get that pimp killed. There's no point. I'll do something else. No, no, no. I want to use maybe I'll buy my own pimp from the middle, even though it costs me money. No, no, no. I want to use your other pimp, Scott, not the one you're loading up that other pimp. That's right. Give me your good pimp. That's right. And then when I go around and I say, oh, which pimp do I want to kill? Well, Rims losing the game. I don't really need to kill any of his stuff. Oh, but what's that? I see Joey Jojo's got a marker on Rims pimp and Jojo does win in the game. I can hurt Joey Jojo and Rims by attacking that dude. Yep. So despite being highly political, the politics is deeply constrained by the realities of the game and the deal making ends up being the right level of complexity. Like the kinds of deals I've seen having played this game a few times are things like, here, Scott, if you let me use your pimp, I'll cut you in 50% on the deal that that pimp facilitates. That's a perfectly fine deal, especially if you make such deals frequently with a lot of players and most of them execute, you will end up on the plus side because everyone else will have executed one deal and you'll have executed three or four. Yep. Or I might make a deal like, listen, Scott, let me use your pimp. I'll give you five grand in cash right now, because if you have a deal that pays out until you trigger the deal as one of your actions, you don't have that money. So getting cash up front might be very valuable to be able to afford the business. I forget if you can kill your own dudes. Yeah, you can bash your own dude, I think. Right. So maybe not. I don't remember. Yeah, I don't remember if you could. I don't think I did. No one did. I don't think I would. I think I might have asked, but it's like, I could make a deal. We're like, all right, you can use my pimp, give me some money and then I shoot my pimp. Yeah. But that generally like the other thing I've seen happen is because this thing is just keeping the pimp. He does spit out money all the time and because it's a real transactional negotiating game, I've found reliably that players who act in good faith tend to get ignored by the other players or just attacked outright and revenge is a powerful mechanic in the context of this game in a way that I haven't seen play out in other games that have similar themes and mechanics. This game is just a very well crafted, perfect storm of the right mechanics, the right turn length, the right level of interaction to give you all that fun feeling of a kind of serious and realistic mafia game without getting too bogged down in details and without being just advanced werewolf. Yeah. The thing about the other thing about this game is that it's just cards. Yeah. It's just all cards. So it's real cash. It's all the cash is a little is papers. It was not the greatest. I think I might replay it wasn't. See, usually when I see paper money, I'm like, er, but actually I thought that when I saw the game set up on the table, but actually when I was playing, it was never a problem. So it feels good when you like I asked someone to kill it. I think I would still replace it with chips just because, you know, right? But I don't know. I didn't upset me like bad paper cash in other games. Well, because something felt good or leave it. Something felt good about getting a fat stack of cash and then doing the one for you, one for me. Yeah. A one to two for me. One. It's two for you. One two for me. But anyway, but the if you made chips or replace the money, you could really pack this game small. Yeah. Size. The game's already really small. Right. I'm saying size per game. Really good ratio. It also ain't that expensive. Like I forget what I'm saying. It's a lot of game in a small package. And it doesn't take that long to play, but you get a lot when you do play it. All right. Oh, yeah. And there's an expansion that adds more mobsters that are powers, which also it's very easy to expand a game. There's just a stack of cards. You just make more cards. You want to just buy this on Amazon. It's like 40 bucks. That this game is worth 40 bucks. Yeah. But it is a lot for a stack of cards, though. It's a it's a heavy stack. There's a lot of cars. It is true. Yeah. Also, I'm pretty sure at a game store, you'll find this at a much significant discount. Oh, OK. At PAX, it was on pretty big sale. In fact, I was going to go buy it. It's not. It's not a big hit game. So it gives us from 2014. Oh, so maybe the prices up is hard to find now. There's 19 in stock on Amazon, Amazon from Capstone Games right now. Expansion, there's only one left in stock. Maybe I'll just buy this right after the before I put the episode up. So yeah, this game is worth playing if you want like this kind of mafia. If you want a game that involves deal making and threatening. Direct attacking other players. Yes. Or threatening people in a way that will actually elicit a response other than fuck you, it's risk. You're going to attack me anyway. Right. It's a voter wins game, but also has significant like, you know, mechanic stuff going on. If you can make good deals like structured deals, you can use this in the game. I've seen people make pretty complex deals. Right. I'll let you borrow this guy and this guy. But then you're going to give me half the money from that deal and I get half the money from that. In one game, I sold insurance to people where if they gave me five grand, then I would give immunity from certain kinds of negative activities and protection rackets work in this game. And sometimes it's worth it to pay the protection racket. Do what mafia would do. Yeah. This has been Geek Nights with Rima and Scott special thanks to.