Family Business (game)

Family Business is a card game of mob vengeance for two to six players, published by Mayfair Games in 1982 and reissued in 1989. Its fifty four card deck represents six rival criminal organizations drawn from real organized crime history, including the Capone Mob, Murder Inc. and the Purple Gang, each fielding its own roster of mobster characters. On a turn, players use contract cards to put a hit out on an opponent's mobster, attack cards to carry it out, and rescue cards to save their own characters from elimination, pushing targeted mobsters into an escalating line called the Up Against the Wall queue. Once that queue holds more than five mobsters, a Mob War automatically breaks out and clears characters from play in bulk. Despite its violent theme the game rewards negotiation and reading other players' intentions as much as the luck of the draw, and the last player left with a surviving mobster on the board wins.