City of Gangsters
ALSO BY THE DEVELOPER
the Game
In this new management tycoon game you’ll start a criminal operation from nothing, and grow it into a well-oiled money machine! Build speakeasies and illegal distilleries. Manage production chains and resource distribution. Set up illicit gambling dens and squeeze your debtors dry. Smuggle goods from out of town and bribe the police to look the other way. Grow a powerful crew and keep your rivals under your thumb. Eliminate competition and rule the city. But most importantly, keep the money flowing.
The year is 1920, the start of Prohibition in the USA. With congressional action, a huge segment of the national economy becomes illegal overnight: bars and saloons are ordered to close, distilleries and breweries go quiet, distributors shut down. But a new era is dawning: a gilded age for smugglers, black markets, illegal manufacture, and organized crime.
This is where you come in. You’re a new arrival in the city at the dawn of Prohibition, with ambitions of striking it big. Behind many of the city’s facades, people are building makeshift distilleries, secret loading docks, nighttime speakeasies. Work your way into this network, and the world will be yours.
But think beyond making a quick buck or two. You gotta be thinking ahead. You gotta be thinking bigger. Much bigger.
Get started in the booze biz by hocking some homemade hooch. Start your own stills, and find raw materials to supply them. Learn new techniques to make expensive drinks, or smuggle imported booze to fuel your growing operation. Soon you’ll be supplying entire neighborhoods, and opening your own swinging speakeasies.
On the black market, social currency matters as much as the greenback. With cops and feds sniffing around, trust is everything and personal introductions are worth their weight in gold. So work your connections to find profitable new friends, and get people who owe you favors to put in a good word.
You will need plenty of hands to open new fronts, do delivery runs, and protect your product from envious rivals. Your outfit’s ambitions are only limited by the number of people working for you. Keep them paid, armed, and organized, and who knows how far and how fast you’ll rise.
But proceed carefully, because everyone is always observing what you’re doing, and family members stick up for each other. Whether you send your people to harass someone, or to help them, you can be sure they’ll remember it down the line.
As your outfit grows, convince locals that your goods and theirs will be looked after. Territory under your control will provide a safety net, an income base, and a wealth of opportunities for further growth and expansion.
You’ve grabbed the opportunity by the horns, and the city is yours for the taking. But you only have a few years to make your mark on history, to build the largest, most profitable crime syndicate, take over your competition, and rule the entire city. Because after 1933, it will be all over, alcohol will be legal again. And doing business fair and square, well, everybody knows that’s not where the real money is.
Game Discussion
Steam User 13
Good Game especially in early game. If you get good at it, you can really get the cash flow up which means you invest more, which means each turn becomes so complex to manage. As a result, I was never able to finish to prohibition before my empire became so big each turn would take 20 minutes of planning. I don't think you need all the expansions. Base game should be enough.
Steam User 9
A well made crime management sandbox game. Visually & audibly pleasing while maintaining a stable, bug free experience for a large real time map. UI & tutorial make the game easy to understand. Game play wise, you can run protection rackets, turf wars, sell booze, speakeasies, gambling dens etc.. I found the beginning & mid game to be very fun. But it got a little too complicated when trying to produce the more complex booze type multi ingredient lists. And Gambling dens did need a little too much hands on work. Reminds me a lot of when I played Gangsters Organized Crime back in 1998. Now we just need someone to make a modern take on Cutthroats terror on the high seas.
Steam User 13
If, like me, you have a deep aching nostalgia for 1998's Gangsters: Organized Crime but can't get it to work on a modern computer, then absolutely pick this up on sale. I've played a lot of gangsters games and this comes the closest to scratching that itch.
But on its own merits it is underwhelming. RNG is so bad I, and the forums, recommend restarting the game again and again until you get a start that is actually workable. Missions are clumsy and as far as I can tell can't be cancelled, but you can only have a few of them. Saving the game means freezing for two minutes. Territory progression is heavily throttled and never gets faster. Honestly, go get Gangsters on GOG and see if you can get it to work instead. It also has issues that were never fixed but has the excuse of being older than patching.
Edit: Alright it's growing on me. The mid to late game has much more complexity. My biggest remaining problem is the way missions are handled
Steam User 4
Thoroughly enjoyed playing this game. A few things I wish would be easier - 1) managing routes. This can be challenging when attempting to optimize routes. 2) managing production buildings. The ability to halt production or throttle production would be nice.
Steam User 4
Buy this game cheap while it is on a sale. Overall it is a game that keeps me involved with it. My issues are that the game can seem like a chore and sometimes I get bad maps with poor starting positions and resources.
Steam User 4
City of Gangsters is a bootlegger simulator based in prohibition era USA, You start as a fresh immigrant in a family members' backroom growing your criminal empire by relationships, force, racketeering and of course bootlegging.
The game is engaging as you start from your small corner of your chosen city and spread across them map corner by corner. There are plenty of beverages to brew with several tiers of increasing value(with increasing complex production chains) with the DLC there's politics and gambling too.
You have ti deal with rival outfits, small time corner hoodlums and of course the coppers and the bureau of prohibition.
CoG is a diamond in the rough, there are a few problems with automation, the clunky UI, tooltips are sometimes completely unhelpful and the AI isn't strong but despite this the immersion is great and if you can stand the late game micromanaging you'll have a lot of fun with this game.
Another game where i'd love to see a polished sequel perhaps with even more criminal endeavours.
Steam User 4
A hidden gem.
Quite a dry game (no pun intended) in the sense that it's heavy on management and light on "action", this is however by design and well understood. The mechanics blend together nicely and immersively and the DLC adds fair enhancement for the amount paid. If you enjoy heavy resource management then this is simply a must-have. It combines the Civ "just... one... more... turn..." addictiveness (and lack of time pressure) with Rimworld levels of "OMG what is this spawn?" (for better or worse) with train/transport simulator game levels of management of your logistics routes.
My one cautionary note would be that the early game is a bit hit-miss, on some starts you can be scratching your head as to how with optimal play you're supposed to get things going, but for the types of player who this game should appeal to the most, they would either recognise this and start a new spawn quickly, or embrace the brutality of the bad start.