MOB – Big Apple – On kickstarter now

Given the typical Friday nights that many people are having right now, who wouldn’t want to play a game about cornering the booze market!

MOB: Big Apple is a 2-player area control and action selection game that just hit Kickstarter yesterday. It’s designed by noted designer Steve Finn with artwork by Ossi Hiekkala and David Sookochoff. It’s published by TGG Games.

It’s on Kickstarter now, and it really looks amazing.

The game is about two rival gangs who are fighting over contraband booze during Prohibition.

Each round (there are three), each player will be taking 20 henchmen and placing them either at locations to lock down the booze or on an action that they can then carry out.

First, they will roll the two dice. This roll will indicate which area they can place henchmen and how many can be placed there.

While this is optional (you may not want to put any henchmen out), the second step is not.

You will have to choose an action space to put one or more henchmen (depending on how many are required for the action) on the action board. Even if you don’t want to take the action, you have to put the henchmen on the board.

Once you are out of henchmen for the round, your round is over but if the other player has henchmen left, they can take as many turns as it takes for them to run out.

At the end of each round, one of the players will be under investigation by the District Attorney, meaning the other player can get some benefit. Then, if there are areas that have henchmen controlled by both players, there’s a shoot-out!

This basically eliminates henchmen on a 1-1 basis until only one player has henchmen there.

At the end of 3 rounds, all six areas are scored.

Each area may have one or more “mole” chips. These are chips secretly placed at the beginning of the game with values from 1-3. If they haven’t already been revealed and removed, the mole chip is turned over and that player gets that many more henchmen in the area. These mole chips may have been moved during the game, so a space may either not have any or could have multiple!

Whoever has the most henchmen in the area wins all of the booze crates that are there.

After scoring each area, whoever has the most crates wins! (There are ways to get booze crates during the game too, essentially give you “free” victory points before the game ends).

I watched the playthrough tutorial on the Kickstarter page and this game looks great! It’s fast (30-45 minutes), has some interesting-looking decisions on area control and what actions you want to take to enhance your area control.

It’s 2-player only, which makes this a great lunchtime game (if we ever get back to the office, curse you COVID!)

It already looks beautiful and apparently there will be some upgrades, like the crates of booze and possibly the mole chips.

After watching the video, I instantly backed it because the game looks cool.

In addition, it’s not arbitrarily expensive and over-produced. For $30 US plus shipping, you can get a copy of the game.

There are no stretch goals and no “extra cool” pledge levels.

For $55 you can get…two copies of the game.

How is that not great?

I’ve loved the Steve Finn games I’ve played before so I don’t doubt this will be another great one on the list.

It’s already almost reached it’s $10,000 goal (and probably will have by the time this post goes live tomorrow). You have until February 24 to back it.

Go check it out and let me know what you think.