Cardboard Mob & Hot Spirits – Speakeasy Review

When many people think of The Mob, they are thinking of New York mafia types, or New Jersey ones like the Sopranos.

But when it gets moved back in time to Prohibition and the gangster wars of the 20s and 30s, everybody can name Al Capone and the many of the rest of them, though they are all Chicago gangsters.

So what does game designer Vital Lacerda do?

He sets a Prohibition-era gangster game in New York and only briefly references the well-known Chicago gangsters.

Yes, Speakeasy is the New York Mob game where you are buying or producing illicit booze and then selling it to gain a bunch of money.

Meanwhile, you’re also horning in on mobster territory, associating with other mobsters, and possibly attacking (or buying from) booze ships run by the Chicago gangsters.

Speakeasy was published by Eagle-Gryphon Games in 2025 (though many backers didn’t receive it until January 2026). It was designed by Lacerda with incredible artwork by the incomparable Ian O’Toole.

It’s also a monster game.

I mean, literally. The box is so huge that my friend who owns the game has a suitcase dedicated to it.

Here’s a size comparison.

It’s also a bear to teach, but it’s so worth it.

I played this game three times in two weeks (one Sunday and then twice the next week at the 2026 Terminal City Tabletop Convention), helping teach it twice.

It’s a long one!

Be ready for length in both teach and play, at least until you get more skilled at it (or play with three players, as all three of my games were at 4).

Let’s get into why this game is so good.

It also takes up a lot of table space.

Make sure you budget for that!

Like many Lacerda games, the appeal is how you take your one action or “worker” placement and then have that expand into a bunch of different action types, with some free action possibilities to boot.

In Speakeasy, that worker placement aspect is in the form of city people that you are interacting with in order to do what you want to do.

Those worker spots are at the top of the board, and each one is divided into three (or maybe two) actual spaces.

Which space you put your worker (called Capos, of course) in will get you that particular bonus. Then the space is blocked, though the space next to it could still be open.

That other space will give a different bonus, but then let you take the same action.

Of course it’s a Lacerda game, so bumping is a distinct possibility.

There is a space that will hold three workers, which will then let you bump somebody else (not yourself!) from an occupied space. The bumped player will get a small bonus but you get to do the effects of the previously-occupied space.

After three bumps have happened in the round, no more bumping allowed.

Another often fantastic aspect of Lacerda games is the card play, which many of these action spaces will facilitate.

Each card colour will give you that colour’s action as well as (usually) a bonus that must be taken first.

These actions are the heart of the game, because they are how you are going to run your criminal empire.

You’ll produce alcohol (if you have your Still built), move it around from your Still to your other buildings, or sell it, or maybe send out your family members to protect your assets.

The goal, of course, is to build your buildings out on the board, taking over districts to actually populate your empire.

Cops are spreading around the city trying to keep these enterprises from happening, so if a cop happens to be in your district, you have to have protection out there.

Otherwise it’s as if the building does not exist.

When you build, you can build into empty spaces, or you can try to take over a mobster’s Speakeasy if you have the strength for it.

Each mobster has his or her own district in the city, and you can also ally with one of them to give you a special ability and also the ability to pay them to help you in the inevitable mob wars.

Because you know there will be mob wars.

One of your actions is to associate with a mobster, which gives you that mobster’s ability but then also restricts you from taking over their speakeasies.

Though you could always take them over before associating.

They have no memory!

Or at least they bear no grudges.

Business is business, eh?

One of my favourite actions in the game, though, is dealing with the booze ships in the harbour.

As part of a booze delivery action, you can just buy booze directly from them, but why not steal it instead?

Your associate will not help you attack ships.

For some reason, they’ll help you against other New York mob incursions on your territory, but they won’t attack the Chicago Mob.

Bad for business?

Instead, you’ll need to build up strength by placing family members on the docks.

When you gain family members, they can either go to your player board (for later dispatching to your buildings) or they can go to the docks.

Of course, in classic Lacerda fashion, placing somebody somewhere will give you a bonus of some kind, whether it’s a free thug or maybe a book or helper card.

Thugs can be hired for an increasing cost and they will also add to your strength when either attacking a booze ship or protecting your territory.

Thus, as with most Lacerda games, the simple act of placing a worker on a space can lead to so much stuff, until the board is littered with buildings of all different colours of buildings and men.

We joked that the Speakeasy board is incredibly beige, but it isn’t by the end of the game!

Another thing that makes Speakeasy kind of unique is how you meet some of the goals that will get you points (and perhaps other things).

There is literally one action that will allow you to “Cook Books,” (i.e. spend some books to trigger additional money).

You can gain books many ways, even just for placing your family member on a dock space.

But you can only spend them at the Restaurant, which also will trigger a possible change in turn order.

You can also do two of three different actions, one of which is to cook books.

You look around the board and see which goals you qualify for, and then you spend the book to get the money reward.

There are many book spaces around the board, but these are the Central Park ones, which you can qualify for in different ways.

One requires you to have 12+ potential strength, between your own strength, your mobster association, and your thugs.

You don’t have to spend it, and you don’t have to maintain it. You can spend the thugs later, for example, bringing yourself below 12.

In a neat twist, doing this requires you to use one of your Capo placements, and you only get 11 during the game.

You don’t just say “oh, I qualify for this, BOOM I get money.”

So you have to weigh how and when you want to do this, and which ones you want to do as you can only do a maximum of 3 with each action.

There are games (like Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria) where you have to spend an action to trigger a goal, but I think it’s rare to be forced to do this in a game where you have so few actions.

Of course, what would a game be without tracks? (I hear you, Chris Yi)

Your player board has five tracks that you will be moving up, all of them strengthening whatever action they are below, along with a Strength track that you will use to show your strength when attacking boats or defending/taking over turf.

The red track is how many family members you can hold on your player board, ready to go out and protect the buildings.

The purple one is how many barrels of booze you can sell in an action, while the orange one is how many you can produce.

The green one is how fast your trucks move around the city (you start with one truck, but bumping this track to 3 will give you an extra truck).

Finally, the yellow track is your strength.

The player board also houses all of your buildings, and shows you the building bonus when you put them out there (along with their cost).

The last aspect of the game I want to talk about, because it is a superb design decision that I really love (even when I hate actually using it) is the money that you get during the game.

Money has two distinct locations: in your pocket (or basic supply) and in your vault.

You can spend your pocket money freely.

However, your vault money is basically the proceeds from your illicit activities.

Thus, to spend it, you have to launder it.

That means you have to pay $2 from the vault for each $1 value that you need to spend.

You can mix and match pocket and vault spending.

So if you need to spend $10 for something and you only have $4 pocket money, you need to spend that $4 and then $12 from your vault (the additional $6 you need and the additional $6 for laundering).

At the end of the game, you just total all of your money, so there is no endgame difference between the two, and total money is the victory condition.

It’s just operationally during the game where they are different.

I love that!

You can’t be afraid to spend from the vault because sometimes you need to spend money to make money, and you just don’t have enough.

But it can be painful.

There is way too much going on in Speakeasy to really go into detail (it is at least a 30-minute teach to brand new players), but these are the aspects of the game that I really like.

The economy of actions, the limited number of actions that you have to make expand into multiple options.

Attacking ships (I don’t know why I like that so much) and defending your turf from Mob incursions, which you know about at the beginning of the round, so you can prepare for them.

It’s not a Lacerda game if it’s not intricate, and Speakeasy definitely is that.

The Restaurant action space, in addition to letting you cook books, also lets you spend the bonus tiles you’ve accumulated (two of them, anyway), and often these will have a free action on them.

Other times they’ll just give a bonus, an additional book or protection action or something.

There are also Helper cards that you can gather (you get one at the start), which also often have a free action or bonus or something.

This is an additional way that Lacerda lets you expand your actions to actually be able to do what you want to do, as well as a bit of additional money at the end of the game.

That still doesn’t cover nearly everything.

Ultimately, like any good game, you will often feel like you want to do so much and you won’t be able to do even half of it.

Or you will find something you want to do, but you need two more actions to do it and you only have one.

That’s a solid design!

While I wouldn’t call Speakeasy my favourite Lacerda (that’s still Lisboa, at least until I play it a couple more times and see how it shakes out), this game grabbed me hard enough that I was willing to play it for 3 hours (plus a long setup and teach time) twice in one weekend.

This one spoke to me and I listened.

Even now, I would like to play it again (I was done after two that weekend, but it’s been almost a month now) to see if I can make a different strategy work (I never produced booze, instead just stealing it or buying it).

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it as your first Lacerda, but it’s not a really bad option if the possibility comes up.

The actions are fairly straightforward once you have them explained.

It’s the decision space that’s enough to blow your mind.

And who can complain about their mind getting blown occasionally?