My brother, LaZer, has been telling me all about
Mobsters on MySpace. I was never interested in joining the game before, even though the theme is of interest to me. Now I've seen more of the game I'm interested a bit more but I also still realize that it would be a huge time sink.
Since Mobsters has been a big topic around here for the past few days, I thought it might be a good time to break out
Bootleggers, a board game about mobsters and bootlegging moonshine. I hadn't been able to play it before, so this was a new experience for me also. We had 4 players, Kevin, Jacob, LaZer, and me, which I had read was a good number of players. After playing it once, I can definitely say that I can see the game being playable but probably wouldn't have much action with only 3 players.
Even though I shuffled up the deck multiple times, we seemed to have some bad luck with the draw initially, not getting many Influence cards for the first half of the game. Since we didn't have enough influence, only O'Malley's was open during the first 3 rounds. This meant that there weren't any choices for where to send the trucks, so it was rather uneventful, but maybe that was good for getting a handle on the game initially.
Unfortunately, I had missed a rule about the Speakeasy Improvements, which came up quite a bit before we were able to get much more Influence in town. Because of that mistake, once we got two more establishments opened up for us we were rolling more dice than we should have. Instead of adding 1 to the die roll I misunderstood the improvement to be 1 additional die. I didn't catch that mistake until I was looking up a rule on a different card during the final round of the game (Round 8 for the Short Game Option, which we decided to use since it was the first game and those are usually longer anyway).
In the end, Kevin stomped us with over $70G due to his Controlling Influence in a larger establishment. He was raking in the dough, probably partially due to there being a huge amount of whiskey being consumed there due to rolling 6 dice (whoops!). Everyone seemed to enjoy the game and hopefully we'll get a chance to break it out again tonight. Now that everyone is familiar with the rules we plan on playing a full length game.