A board game modelled on the mafia conflicts that raged in Sicily in the 1980s has sparked outrage in Italy.
The sister of Giovanni Falcone, an anti-mafia judge who was murdered, described the game as an insult to all those who tried to rid Italy of organised crime.
The German company Boardgame Atelier’s “La Famiglia: The Great Mafia War” took home the coveted As d’Or, or Golden Ace, award from the annual games festival in France last year.
It was recently translated into Italian and made available on several online shopping platforms. According to its producer, it is “a conflict game set against the backdrop of a mafia feud in Sicily.”
The key concept behind the game is that players, who stand in for different mafia families, battle with one another to seize control of Sicily by “dominating as many regions as possible” with the help of weapons such as car bombs.
Maria Falcone told the Corriere della Sera newspaper: “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.
“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].”
Much of the southern Italian island was destroyed in the 1980s by brutal mafia wars. During the first two years, more than 1,000 individuals were killed, many of them were civilians.
Mr Falcone and colleague anti-mafia judge Paolo Borsellino were killed by a vehicle bomb in 1992, ordered by Salvatore Toto Riina, the then boss of Cosa Nostra.
The game’s designer, Maximilian Maria Thiel, told the Guardian: “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.”
Mr Thiel added the murders of anti-mafia judges have nothing to do with the internal mafia war depicted in the game.
