Five Families doesn’t quite work. Let’s get that out of the way at the start. Friedemann Friese’s latest big box game had a lot of promise. It mixes together a strange and confrontational auction system with area control scoring, it has wonderfully straightforward rules, and it has cute li’l mobster meeples, but none of these admirable traits can save it. Its joys are undercut by its runaway leader problem, the impact of the capriciousness of the card draw, and, worst of all, monotony.

Still, at least Five Families respects its audience enough to be one of the more interesting letdowns I’ve experienced in a while. I don’t think it’s a good game in the commercial sense, but I wish every game that didn’t work could manage to fail like this. It is something equally or possibly even more valuable than “good”: Five Families is worthwhile.

Married to the Mob

The Five Families are the five principal branches of the Mafia as it operates in the United States. If you’ve seen The Godfather, you know who these guys are. While the idea of the Five Families feels irrevocably tied to mid–20th century America—probably, come to think of it, because of The Godfather—the…

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If you’re reading a review of Reiner Knizia deep cut Ratzia, I figure there’s a good chance you are already at least passingly familiar with the game Ra, the Egyptian-themed auction game with strong push-your-luck elements first published in 1999. Ra is regularly considered one of the greatest board games ever published. It has a hardy rating of 7.7/10 on Board Game Geek, and sits at #117 in their overall rankings. Not too shabby for a game that came out nearly 30 years ago, and that success is certainly deserved. Ra is a terrific game.

Neither Ratzia, nor its previous iteration Razzia!, are so fortunate. Both are held in comparatively slight esteem. Ratzia, a mafia–themed auction game with strong push-your-luck elements, is rated a 6.8 on BGG as of writing, and sits low enough in the rankings that the actual spot doesn’t warrant mentioning.

I find this curious, because Ratzia and Ra are effectively the same game. I do not mean to say that they are similar. No. They are, rule-for-rule, the exact same game. There are a few extra tile types in Ra, but that’s it. These two games are more closely related to one another than Hitchcock’s Psycho is to Gus Van Sandt’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, which at least had different actors. So why this discrepancy…

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