Lang, Cormier, Lim, McNair and Murray Present 2016's The Godfather Trilogy

Designer Eric Lang, known for his "dudes on a map" games, describes The Godfather — a standalone big box board game with high-quality miniatures — as "thugs on a map".

In short, the game is a streamlined, confrontational worker placement game filled with murder and intrigue. In long, you play as competing mafia families who are vying for economic control of the organized crime networks of New York City, deploying your thugs, your don, your wife, and your heir on the board to shake down businesses and engage in area-control turf wars.

Money, rackets, contracts, and special advantages (such as the union boss) are represented by cards in your hand, and your hand size is limited, with you choosing which extra cards to pay tribute to the don at the end of each of the five rounds. At the end of the game, though, cash is all that matters, and whoever has the most money wins.

The game also features drive-by shootings in which enemy tokens are removed from the board and placed face-down in the river. The don of that family member must play cards to fish their guys out of the river and return them to duty on the New York battlefield.

In The Godfather: A New Don, players take control of one of the major mafia families, each trying to assert their power on the streets of 1950's New York in hope of taking the reins as the new kingpin of the criminal world.

In more detail, this design is an area control board game with unique dice mechanisms. Each round, players roll their individual pools of dice, then decide what area of the city they want to focus on trying to capture. Meanwhile, the current Don is able to make players an offer they can't refuse and steal dice from their limited supply. Staying on top proves difficult as every stolen die moves other players up the ladder toward taking over as Don, so the tension rises with each shake of the dice.

With multiple ways to use each die you roll, players never find themselves at the mercy of the dice, instead using what they roll to make their opponents beg for mercy.