27 January 2025
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The translation of the board game La Famiglia: The Great Mafia War into Italian has prompted a number of insensitivity comments about the games theme.
La Famiglia: The Great Mafia War is an award winning board game centred on the theme of The Great Mafia War of the 1980's. Players will go 2v2 against each other, with six different Mafia families, to gain control of southern Italy. As a board game, it splits you into planning phases, developing your abilities and briging fighters and secret orders to the board, and combat phases, where your plans come to fruition. It was the recipient of the As d'Or (The Golden Ace) award, and as such has been widely played, and widely translated.
Mafia Board Game
Though the game has been well received as a board game, it was not until it was translated into Italian that the choice of theming was questioned. There is of course a living memory of the impact that the Mafia wars had and continue to have, which makes the theme an insensitive one for living descendants.
Corriere della Sera newspaper originally published the story, in which they spoke to Maria Falcone, the sister of a murdered magistrate, who said the following:
"I don't understand how it's possible that someone thought of a game like this, that plays with the feelings of those who lost their lives serving the State . I don't understand certain things that have created so much suffering in Sicily and that refer to the pain of so many people. The mafia has only created death in Sicily and in Italy."
Politician Alessandro De Leo wrote to the President of the Sicilian region to dispute the board game, stating within it: "It is unacceptable that a criminal phenomenon with its burden of violence and suffering is transformed into a board game".
Board Game Designer Response
The game’s designer, German born Maximilian Maria Thiel, who also designed Power Struggle, The Guardian reported as responding with the following:
“First of all, I am very sorry if anyone feels hurt or offended by this game. This was not our intention. In this game, only mobsters kill each other. So I don’t see the problem - apart from the theme, which for some seems to be a trigger. In addition, the game is deliberately kept very abstract [blocks instead of figures] so that these murders are not made conscious in the game...Many people associate the Mafia War with the deaths of Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino, who were killed 10 years after the Mafia feud ended, or others. The mafia is still active and killing people. But the murders of all those people had nothing to do with the internal mafia war depicted in the game.”