Scarface 1920: Bloody Business

I had high expectations for Scarface when it came out on Kickstarter, and yet the base game had disappointed us. Big sandbox-style Ameritrash games, like Western Legends, Xia, or Firefly, always run the risk of collapsing under their own weight; here, I felt the design had gone in exactly that direction. I bought Bloody Business when it came out too, but my first impression had been so lukewarm that the box stayed gathering dust on the shelf. If I had not pulled it out recently because I needed to move boxes during a vault reshuffle, I would have left it among the neglected titles and missed out on a very good experience.

Bloody Business, along with its other goodies—an alternate event deck, new gangs, and so on—finally gives the game some substance. Where the base game had felt like bland area control to me, the expansion turns it into a much more complex affair, with brawling, intrigue, and gunfire. It is not simply “a bit more content”: it changes how the conflicts feel and how deeply you get tangled up in everyone else’s business.

Interaction is now blunt and constant, exactly as it ought to be in a game about gangs. There is enough take-that, enough pressure, and enough desire to ruin the plans of the player beside you that the session never becomes a parallel exercise in claiming areas. Bloody Business makes the “Bloody” in its title entirely literal: conflict is not decorative; it is the thing that keeps the game alive.

For me, this is one of those rare expansions that elevates a game so much that I never want to return to the base box on its own. The trade-off is time: our two four-player games both ran for more than four hours. Still, they were more than four hours of thoroughly entertaining carnage. Just do not suggest it to a group that cannot handle take-that—here, the other players are not merely fellow travelers; they are your problem.