Speakeasy

After unboxing games by the Portuguese designer, from CO2 onward, my first thought is usually, “What have we gotten ourselves into now?” Speakeasy is no exception: the production is substantial enough to become tiring before the player trays are filled, and at first I feared it might be Weather Machine’s more punishing sibling. EGG’s production, though, once again has that care that wins me over. Once the box is organised, setup and teardown are quick. Better still, the rules are approachable, with good examples and a logical sequence: everything serves the theme, and I am rarely left staring at a meeple and wondering what I am supposed to do with it.

Here, I am a gangster family in Prohibition-era New York, working for Lucky Luciano and trying to make more money than the other families. Worker placement is the core: over eleven moves, I build my criminal empire and chase cash. Very early on, though, the game makes its tight constraints clear. Every move matters, miscalculations are not forgiven, and they are often punished mercilessly — a lesson unsuspecting players will probably learn in their first game. Personally, I find that a welcome response to the current wave of feel-good euros.

The density of choices is its greatest strength. I place workers and play cards, open businesses, send family members out for protection, move illegal barrels, contest areas, pursue goals and tracks, hit ships unloading rum and Irish whiskey, and invest in casinos. Despite all that chaos, the systems connect through an honest logic, while the balance between safe low-return investments and riskier, more profitable options is exceptionally well considered. Rather than merely reacting to what others do, as in quite a few of the designer’s other games, I am mainly clashing with their openings and strategies. Every game makes me want to improve my own play or find a counter to the approach that sent someone else to the bank.

The one oddity for a gangster theme is that we do not trade gunfire with one another: armed conflict is between players and NPC gangs, while player-versus-player interaction remains mostly passive area control. The explanation that Luciano did not allow his capos to kill each other feels a little convenient to me; the game probably just does not want to leave the boundaries of a euro. And honestly, that is for the best: with more direct player conflict, I think it would have been worse.

We have played two and a half times — the first game stopped after five rounds, because we were still working out exactly what it was doing — and my impression is already one big wow. If Speakeasy is not a 10/10, I struggle to think what else deserves that label. For me, it is easily game of the year, even though it came immediately after the excellent Perseverance 3 & 4, and it now sits alongside Carnegie among my group’s top heavy euros. If you cannot stand the master’s style, this will not convert you. Everyone else, dive in: it will reward you with many excellent games.