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A board game based on the mafia wars that raged in Sicily in the 1980s has caused controversy in Italy, with the sister of the murdered anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone describing it as an offence to all those who had fought to free Italy of organised crime.
La Famiglia: The Great Mafia War, produced by the German firm Boardgame Atelier, won last year’s As d’Or, or Golden Ace, a prestigious prize given at an annual games festival in France.
Described by its producer as “a conflict game set against the backdrop of a mafia feud in Sicily”, it was recently translated into Italian and distributed on various online retail sites.
The basic premise of the game is for players, who represent various mob families, to compete against each other to take control of Sicily using tools such as car bombs “to dominate as many regions as possible”.
Merciless mafia battles in the 1980s wrecked much of the southern Italian island. More than 1,000 people were killed within the first two years of the decade, including many civilians who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The notorious Cosa Nostra boss, Totò Riina also rose to prominence in the 1980s, and ordered the car bomb murders of Falcone and his fellow anti-mafia judge Paolo Borsellino in 1992.
“I don’t understand how it is possible that someone thought of this game, which plays with the feelings of those who have lost their lives serving the state,” Maria Falcone told the Corriere della Sera newspaper. “The mafia has only created death in Sicily and Italy. A game like this offends the memory of all those who contributed to freeing this land [of organised crime].”
Alessandro De Leo, a politician with Forza Italia, the party established by the late former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, sent a letter to Sicily’s president, Renato Schifani. “This product not only offends the dignity of Sicilians but devalues the daily commitment of millions of citizens who fight for legality and justice in our region,” he wrote.
The game’s designer, Maximilian Maria Thiel, said: “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.”
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Thiel, who said he had lived in Italy at about the time of the Falcone and Borsellino murders, added: “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.”
