THE KINGPIN'S GUIDE

The Whole Racket

This is five guides in one, because Moonshine Kingdom is five games in one, played simultaneously, with the same ten markers. A boss who plays them separately is playing all five badly. The point of binding them into one book is the seams: every chapter ends where another begins, and the games are won in the seams.

The Day, in One Breath

Each Day runs dawn to midnight. Shadows: The city cooks a common mash, the boilers fire or burst, each boss takes his pick of the Jobs Market, and whatever Influence isn't promised elsewhere funds the day's Ledger. The Hustle: Plays around the table, one at a time, until every boss has stepped off the street, and the order they step off decides everything about tomorrow. Reckoning: The cops thin the armies, the Deeds and crowns change hands, and the city checks whether anyone just won.

The One Line That Runs the City

Plays today  =  Influence  −  staked  −  Heat,  up to the Ledger's 5 slots.

Commit that to memory, because every chapter in this book is a fight over one of its three terms. Influence is capacity, not actions: the Ledger stops at five slots, so the markers above your fifth are the ones that stake Jobs and refill the five the Heat Track keeps. Staked is every promise you've made to the Market and not yet kept. Heat is every noise you've made that the law hasn't forgiven yet, and the nightly Reckoning does not forgive it; only a Raid does. Raise the first term, time the second, aim the third. That is the entire game, and the rest of this book is the detail.

The Three Clocks

Under the day loop, three slower clocks tick. The cheap Respect drains one way: completed Jobs leave the deck for good, and the easy tier goes first. The Influence ladder climbs one way: from the 6 markers everyone starts with to the 10 that crown a king, at $2,500 a rung. And the Heat cycle turns over and over: quiet, loud, sirens, refund, quiet. Every plan in this book is really a claim about which clock matters most right now.

The Book, Part by Part

It runs in five parts, in the order the day deals them. Part I, The Brew Engine is how the dawn stills really make their money, why seven is armour, and how to pick the Harbormaster's pocket. Part II, The Jobs Market is why the word on the street never changes, what a promise costs by the day, and when to reach for the card. Part III, The Standoff is when to fold, when to raise, why the fortress is the exception, and how the wise gun fires late. Part IV, Heat and the Law is how the Raid picks its door and how to pick it first: planting evidence, decoy warehouses, and the fine art of the Rat. Part V, The Table is handshakes, frame-ups, bounties and conspiracies, the whole business of cooperation in a game with no shared victories. The Contents overleaf points at every chapter, and at each play inside them.

A Note on the Figures

The combat and brewing numbers are Monte Carlo estimates from the game's own simulators, 100,000+ trials per figure, rules-accurate down to each mob's signature Plays. The Jobs and Heat numbers are deterministic: read straight off the rules and machine-checked against the live card files. What none of them can model is the table: who reads whose barrels, who blinks in the staring contest, and whether the man holding the card you need can be talked out of it. Those decide more games than the arithmetic does. Hence Part V.

Part I · The Brew Engine

Before the sun clears the tenements, the stills are already breathing. Steam in the pipes, mash in the boilers, and out the back a river of clear liquor that turns into a river of dirty cash. It looks like luck: a roll of the bones and a prayer. It isn't. Behind the dice sits a small, sharp piece of arithmetic, and the bosses who read it right out-earn the ones who don't without ever rolling a better number.

The One Rule That Governs Everything

Every dawn the city cooks a common mash. That's the Mash die (grey as the Moonshine it makes), sitting in the open for all to see. Then, in Turn Order, each boss drafts one Red die from the pool and lays it beside the Mash. The two together are your Brew Number, and that number is the tune your empire plays today. Every Still you Control whose boiler shows that number roars to life at once; every Still on a different number sits cold, a dead kettle in a dark room.

Read that twice, because the whole trade falls out of it: the dice only ever hand you one number a day. A boss with a 7-boiler and an 8-boiler doesn't light both off the same roll: one cooks, the other waits its turn. But a boss with two 7-boilers fires both together, off the same lucky pair of dice. Matching numbers stack their yield; mismatched numbers take turns and leave you idle. One lever bends that law, and only one: stand your Boss on a Still that fires, and he can walk the batch to one more Still you Control next door, whatever its number (Split the Batch; this chapter closes on him). So the game of the Brew is deciding which numbers to marry your money to, and, because the old man walks on land, which streets.

And here's the gift: you see tomorrow coming. The Mash for the next dawn is set the night before, at the close of the Shadows, and it sits face-up on the board through the entire day's business. So half of every Brew Number on tomorrow's table, and half of every Blowback that could gut your crew, is public knowledge a full day early. Seizing the Stills that pair with it, walking your Boss out of harm's way, Laying Low early to grab the first draw of the bones: those aren't hunches. They're the sharpest plays on the board, and the intel is already in your hand.

The Hand on the Dice: The Harbormaster

Here is the wrinkle that separates a kingpin from a gambler. That common mash doesn't fall from heaven. It comes ashore in barrels of molasses, up the piers, over the docks; and whoever holds the Harbormaster Title, the crown for Controlling the most Dock Districts, owns that trade. So at The Morning Fix, the close of each Shadows, the Harbormaster doesn't leave tomorrow's Mash to the roll of a die. He names it. Any face he likes, 1 through 6. Every drop of molasses lands on his wharves, and he decides what the whole town brews at dawn.

That turns half of every rival's Brew Number into a political number: a favour granted or a knife slipped in, depending on whose Stills he means to feed. He will name the face that lights his own boilers and leaves yours stone cold, and because the Mash sits in the open all day, the whole table watches the squeeze coming and can do nothing about it after the fact. The only question left worth asking is the one that wins games: what will he pick, and can he lock me out of my own morning?

The Magic of Seven

The answer to "can they lock me out?" comes down to a single, beautiful quirk of arithmetic. A boiler on number n can only fire if the Mash leaves a draftable Red (1–6) to complete it: that is, if n minus the Mash lands between 1 and 6. Work that through for every boiler number and a clear winner falls out:

How many of the six Mash faces leave a boiler reachable by a draftable Red

Boiler #	Mash faces that keep it alive	# of faces	Can the Harbormaster starve it?
6	1–5	5 of 6	Yes: names 6
7	1–6 (all)	6 of 6	No, never
8	2–6	5 of 6	Yes: names 1
9	3–6	4 of 6	Yes: names 1 or 2
10	4–6	3 of 6	Yes, easily

Seven is the only lockout-proof number on the board. Whatever face the Harbormaster names, some Red in the pool always completes a 7, so a stack of sevens can never be starved dead, only haggled over in the draft. Every other clump can be shut clean off: name the right face and a wall of 8-boilers fires nothing at all that morning. Cold iron and idle men. On this board, "just cook sevens" isn't a hunch a made man passes down for luck. It's armour.

Count the Boilers Before You Plan a Stack

Before you fall in love with a number, count how many of it the city actually owns. This is the census nobody reads, and it quietly decides every build in this chapter:

Every boiler in the city, by number, and the biggest stack it can ever make

Boiler #	How many exist	Biggest possible clump
7 – Sugar Hill, Morris Park, Richmond Hill, Williamsburg	4	Four: the only 4-stack on the board
4 – Corona, Sheepshead Bay, Tottenville	3	Three
6 – Flushing, Red Hook, Stapleton	3	Three
2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11	2 apiece	A pair, and no more
12 – East Harlem	1	None. It stands alone.

Read that table and half the strategy writes itself. Only seven can be stacked four deep. Only 4 and 6 reach three. Every other number in the city tops out at a pair, and the 12 at East Harlem is a lone kettle that can never match anything. So when this chapter says "clump," understand what the board is actually offering: a wall of 8s or 9s isn't merely starvable, it's two boilers. The fat matching stack every boss dreams about exists on exactly one number, and it is the one number the docks can't starve. Seven is simultaneously the only immune number and the only number you can build an empire on. Every other plan is a pair, or a compromise.

The catch has changed shape. There are four 7-boilers. They begin under the Police, each sharing its Speakeasy with a starting Hotspot Token, so the Raid that moves each Squad unlocks the safest boiler in that Borough and a premium room in the same breath. After that, the Night Mayor may walk the Hotspots. Seven remains brew armour, but it no longer guarantees a permanent $500 address: production and demand can pull apart, and only the crown that counts the most Speakeasies decides where they meet.

The Other Way Out: Spread the Ends

Can't fight your way to the sevens? There's a second road to immunity, and it runs against every instinct that says "clump." Instead of piling onto one number, bracket a low boiler and a high one. A pair like 3 and 9 can never be starved together: the face that kills the 3 (a high Mash) is the very face that feeds the 9, and the other way round. Squeeze one, you open the other.

It costs you something. A spread lights one end a morning, so it never pours like a fat matching stack in a good week; but it always pours something, every single dawn, no matter whose crown sits on the docks, and when a hostile Harbormaster is starving the table that reliability is worth real money. One thing to mind: the low numbers are scarce on the map, just two 2-boilers and two 3-boilers in the whole city, so you bracket the ends. You don't clump them.

And one bracket on the map breaks the see-saw. Not the classic 3-and-9: those four boilers sit in four separate Boroughs, and no two touch. But Whitestone's 5 stares across a bridge at Throggs Neck's 10, both piers. Walk the Boss to whichever end tomorrow's public Mash feeds, and the live end fires while the old man Splits into the dead one: near $740 a Day off ten men, $720 against the cruellest face a crown can name, where the 3-and-9 clears $321. The city's one bracket that touches, and both halves count toward the crown.

Read the Docks: The Crown Can't Starve Itself

For all that dread, the Harbormaster wears a collar of his own making. He cooks Moonshine too (the same common mash the whole city brews), and the face he names lights his boilers exactly as it darkens yours. He cannot reach for a number that starves your Stills without first making sure it won't starve his own. His turf is a leash on the number he can pick, and a boss who reads that leash can walk right up to the crown and pick his pocket. Two things fall out of that, and both are yours to exploit:

• You can predict tomorrow's Mash by reading the Harbormaster's Stills. A crew cooking high boilers (8s, 9s) will name a mid-to-high face to fire them; they daren't name a low one, because a low Mash leaves their own high Stills cold. Their turf tells you their hand a full Day early.
• Mirroring is a hard lock. Build your Stills on the same numbers the Harbormaster holds. Whatever face he names to fire his own boilers fires yours too: there is no Mash he can pick that lights his engine and darks a matching one. He can only starve you by starving himself, and a boss who cooks Moonshine won't. Ride the crown's own greed.

This is why the truly spiteful shutout (the 8-stack starved to $0 in the ledgers below) only lands on a crew whose numbers don't overlap the Harbormaster's. Match his range and the worst case softens into "we both brew, every morning." The lesson isn't to fear the docks; it's to watch them.

The Kill Shot: Mirror, Then Lay Low First

Mirroring gets you a seat at the Harbormaster's table. Laying Low first takes his chair. The Harbormaster sets the Mash at the end of Shadows, in the open, before anyone acts. Then, all through the Hustle, tomorrow's Turn Tokens are claimed one by one in the order players Lay Low: step off the board first and you claim Token #1, the first draft of tomorrow's Red pool.

Here's why that's murder against a tight-clumped crown. When the Harbormaster cooks a single number, the face he names to fire it leaves exactly one firing Red in the whole pool: name Mash 2 to light your 8s and only a 6 completes them. That scarcity is the trap he laid for the table. But with first draft, you take that one golden Red. He built the shortage; you pocket the only key.

A mirror crew's fire rate by draft position, vs a Harbormaster clumped on one number

You mirror his stills and…	You fire	He fires	He's denied
Lay Low first: you draft #1	60%	11%	89%
Lay Low last: you draft behind him	11%	60%	40%

Same stills, same Mash: the draft order alone swings your morning from 11% to 60% and leaves the crown starving nearly nine mornings in ten. And the tighter he clumps to threaten the table, the fewer firing Reds exist, and the more first draft is worth. He cannot wriggle free by spreading, because a spread Harbormaster isn't starving anyone in the first place.

The price of the chair, and it went up. Laying Low ends your Hustle for the Day: every Play you'd still have made is the fare for Token #1. And The Offers run in reverse Turn Order (see Part II), so Token #1 picks the Jobs Market last: the chair costs today's tempo and tomorrow's pick of the work. Against a crown clumped on one number, 60% against 11% is worth almost any fare; against a spreading one, take the high token: pick the Jobs, and hold the match.

Three Principles of the Brew

Park the Boss: Split the Batch

One lever the tables leave out: when the Still in your Boss's District fires, you may fire one other Still you Control in a District Connected by Land or Bridge, whatever its number. A second boiler, on a morning nothing could have reached it. But there's a knife to it: a Blowback plays no favourites, and if your number is the one left to burn, the Boss is the first body on the floor, and a crew with no Boss skips The Offers next morning, so rivals pick over the Market while you spend a Play on a Rise.

His number is his payday and his death sentence, and it is the same number. A boiler only lights when the Mash can reach it, and the Blowback comes off that same arithmetic. Stand him on a 7, the one number all six Mash faces complete, and he Splits near half of all mornings and burns on 7.7% of them. Stand him on a 3, which only two faces reach, and he Splits seldom and dies on 2.6%. No square pays often and dies rarely; pick which you are buying.

The Split is worth whatever crew stands on the far boiler, so what you want beside him is a fat Still on a number he doesn't already share. The board draws the example itself: Sugar Hill's 7 fires constantly and sits across the avenue from East Harlem's lone 12: the rarest boiler in the city, dead weight in any other build, and yours whenever the 7 lights. Note what does not work: the four 7s are one to a Borough and no two of them touch. A wall of sevens cannot Split a single barrel. And better still, the Red that fires his Still is the same Red that bursts it if you leave it behind, so lifting it for the Split pulls the assassin off the table in the same motion: the one draft in this game that pays twice.

One hole left, and it costs nothing to know: your seat doesn't matter, until your number doubles. Whatever chair you draft from, the Red you take leaves the pool with you, so if the face you need showed up once, no leftover can ever burn that boiler. You are only in danger from a double: two 4s on a Mash of 3, you lift one, a rival cheerfully leaves the other. That is when the chair matters, and only the last seat helps: he picks from the final two dice, so he alone decides what stays on the table.

The Don is a Play, not a statue. Rise reads like a funeral rite, but it places your Boss in any Safe District whether the chair was empty or not, and it ignores the map: no Connected route, no water to cross, no hostile block to be Pinned in. Two Influence puts the old man wherever tomorrow needs him, which turns Split the Batch into a dial you re-set at will, because tomorrow's Mash is public from tonight: Rise him onto the junction that will actually fire. It is Blowback insurance on the same terms. And because Control shifts the instant a piece lands, a Rise into an empty Ward can swing the Ward count before the night's Reckoning: the Ward Boss crown changes hands at nightfall, and tomorrow's Recruits shed the rival's Union Fee.

The Numbers Behind It

Expected net take per Day for builds you can crew off a single ~16-man roster: barrels at the $300 Speakeasy rate, less the $300 it costs to Recruit every Runner a Blowback puts in the ground. Read the Hostile column as the ceiling of the threat, a crown naming the cruellest face it can against you: a real Harbormaster is leashed by his own Stills, and mirroring his range is how you climb out from under that column entirely.

Expected net $/Day (Brew Simulator: 4-player contested draft, ~16-man roster, 5 to a boiler under the Sweep, Boss parked and Split the Batch live)

Build	Barrels/Day	Net – Rolled Mash	Net – Hostile Harbormaster
All four 7s (5/5/5/1) (cannot Split)	4.6	$1,117	$1,116
3 matching 7s (lockout-proof)	4.1	$997	$1,000
3 mismatched 6/7/8, Connected	3.9	$765	$807
Sugar Hill spread 7/12/11/8, Connected	3.3	$751	$723
Spread 3/3 + 9/9 (Boss on a 9)	2.8	$663	$691
2 matching 7s	2.8	$655	$650
Bronx block 8/11/9/10, Connected but all high	3.1	$631	$0
2 clumped 8s (a number they can starve)	2.3	$543	$0
Spread 3 + 9 (Boss on the 9)	1.4	$321	$345

Three things jump out. Breadth still wins, but it has to be breadth that touches. The four-seven wall tops the sheet the hard way, because the 7s sit one to a Borough and no two of them are Connected: that wall cannot Split a barrel. Right behind it sits the build this guide used to write off. The 6/7/8 mismatch was second from bottom; it is now third from the top ($398 under the old rule, $765 now), and it alone earns more under a hostile crown than a quiet one. Adjacency, not arithmetic, is what changed.

The lockout is untouched, which is the point of the two red rows: the 8-clump goes to exactly zero under a hostile crown, because Mash 1 leaves no draftable Red that completes an 8. The Bronx block dies with it, Connected or not, because the Split needs the Boss's own Still to fire first. Connection is not armour; only range is, which is why the spreads still go up. But mind where the old man stands: a face named to starve your high boilers puts your low one in the Blowback window every morning. Move him to the starved end and the crown cannot touch him at all: Boss losses fall to 0.0% and the build climbs $663 to $691, for the price of standing somewhere else.

So What's the Optimal Play?

• You (or nobody) hold the docks. Clump as wide as the census allows, and buy the block next door while you are at it. No hostile face is coming, so every extra boiler earns, and one of them earns twice.
• A rival holds the docks. Four lockout-proof answers, in order of price: mirror his numbers (cheapest, his own greed feeds you), clump on 7 (brews most, wants the cop-locked corners), a Connected 6/7/8 (the only build on the sheet that gains from his crown, $807), or spread 3/3 + 9/9 with the Boss on the starved end (cheap ground, and he cannot be touched there).
• Cutthroat, everyone's on you. Fewer boilers, but only because of the guns, never because of the brew: hold what you can defend, on a number they can't dark. And be honest about the trade, because the Sweep caps a boiler at five: you cannot crowd the losses back. You brew less. You just brew it somewhere safe.

Part II · The Jobs Market

Deeds and Titles pay you for what you hold. Jobs pay you for what you do. Five cards lie face-up beside the board, every one a public dare, and none of them ever expires. No deadline, no paperwork: only a stake, sitting where everyone can count it, quietly costing you a Play a day. Most bosses treat the Market like a shop. It isn't. It's a queue, a clock and a confession all at once.

The One Rule That Governs Everything

A Job prints two numbers. Its Respect is what it pays. Its Stake is the Influence you lock out of your Reserves the morning you claim it, and don't get back until you pull it off. But read what a locked marker actually is, because the card doesn't tell you: The Offers run before Fund the Ledger. Stake first, fund second. Every marker sitting on a Job is a marker that never reaches your Ledger, and only Ledger markers buy Plays. So the stake is not a fee. It is rent, and the rent is paid in Plays, every single Day you hold the card. Claim a 5-Respect Job on Monday and pull it off on Thursday, and you have quietly handed your rivals four short days on the street.

The whole system is that one line of arithmetic from the front of this book, Plays today = Influence − staked − Heat, up to five slots, and note what it doesn't say. There is no gate: no Job here is ever unclaimable for want of markers. A big stake costs you actions, not access, one marker for one Play all the way down to a one-Play morning, which makes the fifth slot the only cliff: past it the trade stops costing anything at all.

What a stake costs you, with a clean Heat Track: Plays = Influence − staked, capped at 5 slots

Your Influence	No Job	Stake 1 (a 1)	Stake 2 (a 3)	Stake 3 (a 5)	Stake 5 (a 5 + a 3)
6 – where everyone starts	5 Plays	5 Plays	4 Plays	3 Plays	1 Play
7 – one Bribe in	5	5	5	4	2
8	5	5	5	5	3
10 – the whole Commission	5	5	5	5	5

That table is the chapter in miniature. The markers above your fifth are the ones that stake Jobs for nothing, because the Ledger stops at 5 slots and a sixth marker had no other work to do. At 6 Influence a headline Job costs you two Plays a day; at 10 you carry a 5 and a 3 at once and never feel it. The Commission you were buying to win the game turns out to be the engine that runs your Jobs.

Heat Is Billed to the Same Account

Now put the third term back, because that table is a fiction and every real morning has Heat in it. A noisy Play doesn't return its marker to your Reserves; it locks it onto the communal Heat Track, where it sits until a Raid clears the board. It is gone from the same pool the stake comes out of, and it is gone across Days: the Reckoning does not clear Heat. Only the sirens do. So the ladder in that table slides down one rung for every marker cooling on the Track. Your working capital is Influence minus Heat, and only the first five of it buys Plays. Two markers hot, and a 6-Influence crew has no free capacity at all: even a 1-Respect card starts costing a Play.

Now count the deck: fourteen of the thirty-two Jobs draw Heat in the act of completing them. All eight Open Fires, the five big Unloads, the lone Extort. The Market sells you cards that burn the very currency you need to claim the next one, and a crew halfway up the Heat Track has no room left to promise anybody anything. That is not an accident. There are only three answers: keep your Jobs quiet, climb the Influence ladder faster than you climb the Heat Track, or let the Raid come, because a Raid returns every Heat marker to its owner's Reserves. The cops kick your door in and refund your stake money on the way out (see Part IV).

Bribe is a Jobs play. Everyone reads Bribe as the last chore before the crown: four payments of $2,500 you make when you're already winning. It's the opposite. The 7th marker makes a 3-Respect Job free to hold; the 8th makes a 5 free; and every marker past that is a rung of headroom against the Heat you'll be generating to complete them. Those markers are the cheapest tempo in the game, they were on the road to the throne anyway, and the boss who buys them on Day 4 plays a different game from the boss who buys them on Day 12. The ladder isn't there to make Jobs free. It's there to keep them free once you're loud.

One Claim a Day Is a Rate, Not a Limit

Nothing caps how many Jobs you hold. The Offers let you claim one card a morning, and there is no deadline on any of them, so a patient boss simply accumulates: a 1 on Tuesday, a 3 on Thursday, a 5 the following week, all three sitting staked in front of him at once. The only ceiling is what your Reserves can carry, and the arithmetic runs on your total staked, not on the newest card. That changes the shape of a plan: a three-card overlap isn't a thing you assemble in an afternoon; it's three separate mornings, and the first card starts paying rent from the first one. But it also means the cheap tier compounds beautifully: two or three 1-Respect Jobs, all riding Plays your liquor business was making anyway, cost a total Stake of 3 and complete whenever the barrels happen to line up. Hold a small standing portfolio and let the board complete it for you.

The Five-Play Ceiling Is a Fiction: The Kickback

One rule breaks the whole funding equation open, and it's easy to file under “money” and forget. Every barrel of Havana Rum you Unload moves one spent Influence marker from your Reserves back into an empty Ledger slot. Not next morning: immediately, mid-Hustle, at any venue that takes it. Moonshine pays cash only; Rum pays cash and gives you your day back: $300 worth across a Standard bar, $500 under The Hotspot's token. An Unload costs 2 Influence, so the moment you sell more than two Rum you are running a profit in Plays, though the Ledger's five slots cap that profit at +3:

What a Rum sale does to your day

You Unload…	Costs	Kickbacks	Net Plays	The catch
2 Rum	2	2	0	The sale refunds itself.
3 Rum	2	3	+1	No Heat; the clean repeatable shipment.
4 Rum	2	4	+2	The Greed Tax adds one Heat.
5 Rum	2	5	+3	The ceiling: five Kickbacks refill the Ledger.
6+ Rum	2	5 max.	+3	Extra barrels add cash, not tempo.

The Kickback rides the barrel, not the address. What the address sets is the price: the same three barrels are $900 across a Standard bar and $1,500 under the token, and the Night Mayor decides which Speakeasy in one Borough carries that token today. Chase the premium when the room is reachable; when a rival walks the token off your warehouse, sell where you stand. The tempo was never theirs to move.

Move the market before the barrels. If you hold Night Mayor, walk the token onto your stockpile and take the $500. If a rival holds it, mass Rum where you can sell regardless: the worst their morning snub can cost you is the $200 premium, never the Plays.

Sell late, and sell in threes. Empty slots are Kickback capacity, so a late sale is worth more than the same sale at dawn. Three Rum is the clean tempo shipment at every address on the board: +1 Play, and not a whisper on the Track. The fourth barrel buys its extra Kickback with a Heat marker, and it costs that marker under the token exactly as it does at a Standard bar. What the token changes is the size of the bribe you're being offered to take the risk: five barrels is $2,500 and +3 Plays under it, $1,500 for the same noise without it. Six-plus wastes Kickbacks beyond the five-slot ceiling, and an unused late Kickback keeps its $100 Collect floor: $400 a barrel at a Standard joint, $600 under the token.

The Market Never Moves, and That's the Whole Design

Nothing on the street ages. No card slides down a row, nothing goes stale, nothing is swept away at dawn. The Market changes only when a player changes it: somebody takes a Job or walks away from one, and a fresh card fills the gap. That single fact rewrites how you're supposed to play.

First: there is no clock but your own money. Since the card cannot expire, claiming it early buys you exactly one thing (certainty that a rival won't take it), and you pay for that certainty in Plays, daily, until you fire. Which produces the doctrine this whole chapter is built on:

The bill for a 5-Respect Job (Stake 3) by how early you claim it, at 6 Influence

You claim it…	Days staked	Plays surrendered	What that buys you
The morning you can fire it	1	2	Nothing but the Respect. Which is the point.
Two Days out	2	4	Insurance against one rival's Offer.
Three Days out	3	6	A whole Day's worth of Plays, spent on a promise.
The moment it's dealt	5+	10+	Two lost Days, and five mornings of rivals reading your plan off the table.

Second: the Market lets you plan in silence, and the tell is your board, not your hand. Because the card will still be there next week, the correct play against a card you want is often to say nothing and move barrels. But understand what you're hiding and what you're not. The Job is public. The stake is public. Your intention is the only secret you own, and it leaks through the board, not the Market. Six barrels drifting toward Fordham, a Safehouse creeping into a rival's Ward, your Boss walking into Queens: a boss who reads turf can see a claim coming a full Day before you make it, and take the card out from under you.

Third: a named Job is a standing bounty. Under a churning market, the correct answer to Kill a rival Boss in Queens sitting face-up would be to wait for it to rot off the end of the row. It doesn't rot. The Toll Booth Trap sits there, unclaimed, until somebody is man enough to take it; and until then, every Boss on the board simply avoids Queens. That is the deck doing work with cards nobody has even claimed, and it is why the four headline bounties are named by borough. Read the Market as a map of where not to stand.

Fourth: a claim is a lie you can afford to tell. Everything above treats the public Job as a leak to be plugged, but a leak runs whichever way you aim it. Claiming a Job is the one move that lets you publish an intention, so publish a false one. Take a card that sends you into Manhattan (a Boss to kill, a block to seize) and the boss with turf there reads the war coming and thickens his garrison, pulling guns toward the noise. Your real road runs the other way: out to the neutral piers of Staten Island, nobody's home Borough and nobody's first worry, where a quiet Dock or two hands you the Harbormaster and with it the power to name the city's Mash. The feint costs exactly what the Claim-Late Doctrine warned you about: rent on a card you may never fire, only here the rent is the point. You aren't buying the Respect; you're buying three rivals looking the wrong way for a Day. The loudest thing on the table can be the card you never meant to keep.

The Reverse Snake

The rule is printed on the Turn Structure card and you'll play it right from your first morning: the Brew drafts in Turn Order, first token to last; then The Offers immediately run in reverse, last token to first. What takes longer to sink in is what that reversal does to you. Your Turn Token isn't a rank. It's a package, and the two halves point opposite ways.

What your Turn Token actually buys (4-player: 5 Red dice, 5 cards on the street)

Token	The Brew	The Offers	The Hustle
#1 first off the street	First pick of the Red pool. If your number showed once, you carry it off and it can never blow your boiler.	Picks last. You take what three rivals left you.	First Play of the Day. First into the empty block, first gun through the door.
#4 last off the street	Left holding the match, but you choose which of the last two dice stays behind as the Blowback.	First pick of the Market. Every card is still on the street.	Last Play each round. You react; you don't set.

Now look at how you get a token, because this is where it turns vicious. Tomorrow's tokens are claimed in the order players Lay Low, lowest first, and you cannot pass: on your turn you make a Play or you step off. So the boss who stays on the street longest is the boss with the most Ledger markers left to burn. Which means:

The self-taxing loop: how a stake becomes a queue position

Today you…	So your Ledger holds…	So you Lay Low…	So tomorrow you…
Stake a 5-Respect Job	3 markers	Early: token #1 or #2	Pick the Market last, but draft the Red first
Stake nothing	5 markers	Late: token #3 or #4	Pick the Market first, and hold the match

Read that and the shape of the whole system falls out. The Jobs Market taxes itself. Take the big Job today and the machinery quietly walks you to the back of tomorrow's queue; take nothing and it hands you first refusal on everything the city is offering. Nobody wrote a rule that says you may not hoard Jobs. The turn order does it for them, every morning, for free. There are exactly two ways out of the tax: climb to 10 Influence, where a stake stops shortening your Ledger at all, or hold Rum, where you refill the Ledger mid-day and choose your own closing time. A crew with neither is at the mercy of the loop. A crew with both never queues at all.

And it cuts the way it should, because commitment and freedom buy different things. A crew carrying three staked Jobs, or half its markers cooling on the Heat Track, has a short day: it steps off the street early, takes the low token, and is paid for it in dice. A crew carrying nothing is still working when the others have gone home, and is paid in cards instead. Neither seat is a punishment; they're two currencies, and you're choosing between them every time you decide whether to make one more Play. The tax only falls on the Influence-poor: a kingpin at 10 stakes a 5 and a 3, still fills all five Ledger slots, and chooses his seat freely. If you take one number away from this chapter, take that one: the ladder from 6 to 10 Influence is the difference between renting Jobs and being given them.

The Staring Contest, and What It's Actually About

Late in the Hustle, with two markers left and nothing urgent to spend them on, you are in a staring contest. Step off now and you take the low token: tomorrow's dice and tomorrow's tempo, and a Market picked over by the time it reaches you. Burn a Play you don't strictly need and you outlast the man beside you for first refusal on the street. But tempo in the abstract is almost never what the contest is about; it sharpens on exactly one kind of night: when a card is face-up that two of you want, and both of you know it. Then the queue is the whole game, and it is won three ways: by reading him, by hiding yourself, and by having the Rum to outlast him.

Layer one: read what they're building toward

A rival's plan is written in two places, and neither of them is his face. His staked hand is public, so you already know what he needs; his board tells you when he'll be ready: barrels drifting toward one Speakeasy, a Safehouse creeping off his home turf, bodies gathering two blocks from a Dock. Put the two together and you can date his claim to within a Day. Then do the same for the cards he hasn't claimed, the harder read and the more valuable one, because it lets you deny him something he hasn't paid for yet. A crew massing Rum in Red Hook for four Days is telling you which card it wants off the street, whether or not that card is in its hand.

Layer two: don't be readable yourself

Everything above is being done to you. Claiming late only works if the build is quiet, because the window in which you're vulnerable is precisely the window in which you're visibly ready and don't own the card yet.

• Assemble late and assemble fast. Six barrels arriving in Fordham across four Days is an announcement. Six barrels arriving in one Move, on the morning you claim, is a fait accompli.
• Don't let the last Play be the obvious one. A position that only makes sense as a run at one card has already told them. Stage from somewhere that threatens two things.
• Weigh claiming early anyway. You cannot hide a Safehouse walking across the map. When the build is inherently loud, pay the rent and lock the card; the alternative is doing the work for someone else.
• Or be the Vipers. Whispers claims the deck's top card face-down. Rivals see a Stake and nothing else: the only way in the game to hold a Job that cannot be read, denied, or pre-empted.

Layer three: Rum wins the staring contest

And here is the lever that turns the whole thing from a guessing game into a plan. Everyone else's day ends when their Ledger runs dry. A crew holding Rum decides when its day ends: three barrels sold and you are a Play up, silently. So when a card you both want is sitting on the street, you don't have to hope he blinks; you Unload, refill, outlast him, and take first pick at dawn. At a Standard joint Rum pays the same cash as Moonshine, which is why a crew that never Trades cannot understand why it keeps reaching the Market last. Trade up, or spend the game explaining why the good cards keep going to somebody else.

When to blink first anyway

• Step off early when tomorrow's Mash is a number you own, when the pool looks likely to leave a Blowback on your own boiler, or when there is simply nothing on the street you could complete this week. Dice beat cards when the cards don't fit you.
• Hang on to the end when a card you can fire tomorrow is face-up, when a rival is visibly one Play from a Job you both want, or when you're the Harbormaster and named tomorrow's Mash yourself: you already know what the dice will do, so spend the token on the Market instead. When there's nothing left to do but outlast him, Collect holds your seat without shoving a piece across the board.
• The $100 floor makes money neutral. Unspent markers pay $100 apiece whether you Collect them a turn at a time or cash the whole Ledger when you Lay Low, so the coin never decides the question. What you're really trading is token position: the low token and first draft at the stills, or the high token and first pick at The Offers.

No Boss, no business. A crew with no Boss on the board skips The Offers entirely: no claim, no walk away, nothing, until they spend a Play to Rise. So killing a rival's Boss is not merely a Respect card and a −1 to his Threat: it deletes him from tomorrow's queue. If you and he are racing for the same card, the cheapest way to win the race is to shoot the man out of it. The Blowback will do it for free if he parks the old man on a doubled number, so watch the pool as closely as you watch the Market. But price the threat honestly, because Rise is not only a funeral rite: it places your Boss in any Safe District whether or not the chair was empty, so a Don who sees the knife coming can be two Influence and one Play out of reach before it lands. The queue you delete is the queue of a boss who didn't see it.

What the Deck Actually Asks You For

Thirty-two cards, twelve at 1 Respect, twelve at 3, eight at 5. They sort into four families by what they demand of your board, and the families play nothing alike.

The four families, by verb

Family	Cards	What it needs on the board	The real cost
Logistics Move 6 · Unload 7 · Trade 2	15	Barrels massed, a route, and a venue you Control. Magnitudes run 3+ to 8+.	Almost nothing: these are the Plays your brew engine already makes. The bill is Heat: anything shifting 4+ barrels draws it.
Muscle Open Fire 8	8	Bodies massed, and a rival standing in one named borough. Half the 5s live here.	Brutal. A firefight is one Play but many Influence, and the stake came out of the same pool.
Estate Secure 4 · Recruit 2	6	Your Safehouse relocated, usually off your home turf and into a specific district.	Structural. Recruit is Safehouse-only, so moving the house moves your spawn point into a rival's borough.
The odd three Rise 1 · Rat 1 · Extort 1	3	Your Boss walked somewhere he shouldn't be; the Rat Card; a District in all five Boroughs.	Each costs something no other card asks: your Don, three Respect, or Staten Island.

Four readings fall out of that table, and they matter more than any individual card.

Logistics: the tier that pays you for playing well

Nearly half the deck asks you to move, trade or sell liquor at scale, and if your Brew engine is working, you were going to do that anyway. The 1-Respect end of it rides Plays already on your list for a Stake of 1, free at the Influence everyone starts with, and there is no cheaper Respect in the game, nor will there be: completed Jobs leave the deck permanently, the 1s are the preferentially-claimed tier, and there are only twelve of them. The cheap Respect drains out of the game one way. A boss who sniffs at 1-Respect cards on Day 3 is a boss shopping in a Market of nothing but campaigns on Day 12.

Muscle: you don't have to win, you only have to kill

The rule governing every combat Job is more generous than it looks: a Job is a deed, not a board position, and the deed counts even if it didn't survive the Play. Kill the man, lose the block, and the Job still pays; a suicide raid that murders two dockhands and gets thrown back into the river is a completed Job. Only cards that say Seize, take over or destroy need the outcome to stick. What makes them hard is the arithmetic on the other side: a firefight is one Play however many rounds it runs, but every round costs its own Influence, so the real ceiling on a combat Job is the Ledger's five slots. Stake 3 for a headline kill-count Job at 6 Influence and you walk in with three markers, one to enter and two to shoot, against a garrison Part III says needs three-to-one and three volleys to break.

Estate: the cards that move your whole game

Six cards ask you to put your Safehouse somewhere specific, and since Recruit only happens at your Safehouse, that is never a cosmetic request: you are agreeing to rebuild your spawn point in somebody else's neighbourhood, which is a beachhead, not an errand (Part III prices it). Their compensation is that they are the only Respect in the deck nobody can interrupt, because no rival stands between you and your own Safehouse. When the board has turned hostile and the muscle cards are out of reach, Estate is where a losing position can still bank points.

The odd three: Rise, Rat, Extort

One card each, and each is the deck's only route through a verb the rest of it never touches. That rarity is the whole lesson: a lane with one card in it is a lane nobody is racing you down. The Rise card walks your Don somewhere he has no business being: the Respect is for the nerve, not the distance. The Rat card pays you for calling the cops on yourself, and it is the one card in the deck that pays for its own consequences: the Respect it carries is exactly the penalty the Rat Card charges you at the Reckoning, so you take the call, come out level, and keep the Raid you bought (Part IV, Lever Three, run in reverse). The Extort card measures spread, a footprint in every Borough at once, which means Staten Island, which means the one thing nobody else bothers to build. All three always draw Heat or cost standing. None of them is a card you plan around; each is a card you recognise when the board has already half-built it for you.

Reading the Board: The Four Lanes

1. Your borough's free three

This is the single most useful thing on the board, and it is invisible unless somebody points at it. Every mainland Borough has exactly one Speakeasy that is neither garrisoned at setup nor padlocked by the Police, and all four sit at Pressure 5. Each one carries a 3-Respect Job, and it is the easiest 3 you will ever earn in your own back yard:

The orphan Speakeasy set: one unguarded joint per seat

Your seat	The orphan joint	What the deck asks of it
Manhattan	The Haymarket (Tenderloin)	Sell at scale, on your own doorstep
Bronx	The Penny Whistle (Fordham)	Haul at scale into a room nobody is holding
Queens	Paradise Alley (Flushing)	Sell at scale, and the swill will do
Brooklyn	Sunny's Bar (Red Hook)	Sell Rum, so run the whole Trade chain first

Every seat reads one friendly 3 and one hostile 5. That is the deck's central act of fairness, and knowing the shape is worth more than knowing the four card names: wherever you sit, somewhere on the board is a 3 written for your back yard, and somewhere in the deck is a 5 with your name on it. The four bounties are deliberately borough-disjoint: each one hunts a different seat, and each demands a different act (kill the head, burn the base, take the ground, run up the body count). That is exactly why no single Play in the deck can ever fire two 5-Respect Jobs. Take your own orphan early, before somebody garrisons it to spite you. Watch for your own bounty appearing on the street, and when it does, move the thing it's hunting.

2. The Staten Island lane: nine Respect nobody is competing for

Staten Island is nobody's home turf, its Deed is boxed, and its boilers are the worst in the city. So nobody goes there. And yet the deck writes a card on it at every tier, nine Respect between them: every Dock in the city connects to Staten's two as though they were adjacent, and (the detail Part IV will make much of) no Police Squad ever sets foot there. The island wants your Safehouse, it wants Trades made on its piers, and it wants Rum run off it. Those asks chain: the moonshine you ship in to satisfy one is the moonshine you Trade for the next, and the Rum that comes out of the Trade is the cargo the third one wants moved. One supply line, several cards, on turf no rival is watching.

The price is honest and it is the reason the lane is empty: you must ship the moonshine there first, because Staten can't brew it. Build this lane behind a Harbormaster crown and it's the quietest empire in the game. Note the trap in its own emptiness, though: a card that asks you to take something off a rival on Staten can sit dead for a very long time, because there is often nothing there to take.

3. The Hotspot lane starts locked, then starts moving

The four Hotspots begin beneath Police Squads on padlocked Speakeasies. Premium Rum Jobs wait for a Raid to open a door. Once Night Mayor is crowned, that player can move one Hotspot within its Borough during The Morning Fix: chasing their Rum, abandoning a rival stockpile, or landing on a Job's named room. Heat opens the market; Night Mayor decides where part of it trades. And the room pays past the bar: a Borough counted to a tie hands its Deed to whoever holds The Hotspot, and the token is worth fighting over on turf you'd never sell a barrel from.

4. The East River and Jamaica Bay

Two labelled bodies of water do quiet work in this deck, and they are the tool it uses to keep a card narrow. "A Speakeasy" is twelve rooms and finds you by accident; "a Speakeasy on the East River" is four, and has to be gone to on purpose. The East River touches four Speakeasies (East Harlem, Astoria, Williamsburg, Red Hook) and carries both a friendly card and a hostile one: the same four rooms are a place to sell and a place to be shot at, which is how the deck pays a landmark for itself. Jamaica Bay holds two Docks, Sheepshead Bay and Jamaica. If you sit on either water, more of the deck is written for you than for anyone else; the Bronx, landlocked from both, interacts with the fewest cards in the game. A Bronx boss should lean harder on the borough-generic Jobs and his own orphan joint at Fordham than on the water.

Denial: Taking a Card You Never Intend to Do

You may claim any Job on the street. Nothing says you have to complete it. Take the card a rival has spent four Days building toward and it is simply gone: not discarded, not recycled, just locked in your hand for as long as you care to pay for it. This is real and it wins games. It is also priced, and you should know the bill before you reach. It costs your entire Offer, twice: Take and Walk Away are one of three, never two, so denying a card burns the morning you take it and a second morning to shed it. It costs the stake, every Day in between: at 6 Influence, sitting on a rival's 5 costs you two Plays a Day for as long as the grudge lasts. It costs the queue: a shorter Ledger walks you off the street early, so tomorrow the rival you just robbed picks before you. And it doesn't stop the deed: he can still do the thing, he just doesn't get paid for it. So below ten Influence, hate-drafting is a genuine sacrifice, reserved for the moment it decides the game: a rival on 12 or 13 Respect reaching for the card that crowns him. Then it is cheap at any price, because there is no tomorrow to save Plays for.

The one that isn't a sacrifice. A kingpin at 10 Influence has five markers with nothing else to do. He can take the deck's best card, hold it forever, never complete it, and lose nothing at all: his Ledger still fills, his day is still five Plays long, and his markers still count toward the crown wherever they sit. If the leader is at ten and the Market is thin, expect the good cards to start disappearing into a hand that will never play them. The counter is not to out-bid him; it is to get to ten yourself, or to end the game before he's comfortable there.

Overlaps: Real, Legal, and Mostly Not Worth Chasing

Nothing stops one Play from completing two Jobs, or three. Sell the right cargo in the right room holding the right cards, and one sale pays several times; storm the right district and a single firefight can pay more than every Title on the board combined. These stacks are deliberate, and the deck is tuned so that the ones which survive are the earned kind.

The rule the deck is built to, and the only thing you need to carry. A stack that can fire in one or two districts is a feature: spotting it, drafting both cards one Offer at a time, carrying both stakes for days and then engineering the Play is good play, and you have earned it. A stack that fires in a dozen is a bug, and the deck no longer contains any: they were hunted down with a solver and closed with guards. So overlaps find you; you do not go looking for them.

Four things compound against building for a stack. You can't choose your cards, only take what surfaces. Three cards is three Offers minimum, with the earliest paying rent the whole time, and a triple stake can leave you with zero Plays to make the Play with. Your hand is public, so three staked cards all pointing at the same corner of the map is an announcement, not a plan. And the biggest stacks are Open Fires, the one family where the Play itself eats Ledger markers by the volley.

So: don't build for overlaps. Learn to recognise the shapes that nest, and pick up the second card when the Market puts it in front of you. Three shapes account for nearly all of them: a sale in a room several cards happen to name; a firefight in a district that is somebody's turf and holds something worth taking; and a Trade on a pier where the goods change hands and then move. That is the version that wins games. The nine-Respect firefight is the version you tell stories about.

Three Principles of the Offers

The Four Mobs at the Offers

Where each crew's kit meets the deck

Mob	The edge	The cards it's for
East Side Vipers	Whispers: claim the deck's top card face-down. Rivals see the Stake, never the Job.	All of them. Immune to hate-drafting, invisible while building, and the only crew that can assemble an overlap without announcing it: under a static Market, the strongest Jobs power in the game. Tunnel runs the Logistics tier the same dark way: the stockpile builds at the Safehouse and surfaces, five barrels at a time, in whichever Controlled district the Job wants. Rivals see the stake, never the Job, and now never the shipment.
Sicilian Syndicate	Untouchable ignores the Sweep, so they alone stack a block past five. Hit kills a Boss on demand. Consigliere pulls a marker off the Heat Track.	The headline kill-count 5, which is barely a card for anyone else, and the Boss-kill bounty, which is written for Hit. And Consigliere is the only play in the game that buys back stake capacity.
Harlem Knights	Network gives a free Rum on every Trade; Skiff runs five Mobsters coast to coast, even out of a fight; Torch burns a Safehouse outright.	The Rum ladder, and still the Staten lane, held now by Network rather than the boat: every Dock in the city connects to Staten as if adjacent, and the free Rum on each island Trade is exactly the surplus the island's own cards demand. Crew-only Skiff serves the Muscle tier instead: five men onto any coast, and off it again when the deed is done, which is the deck's hit-and-run card played to the letter, the one that pays for bodies but forbids you the ground. Torch completes the burn-the-base bounty without beating the garrison, the biggest single discount in the deck. And the free barrel every Trade is quietly a tempo trait: more Rum means more Kickbacks, which means the Knights choose when their day ends and are the hardest crew in the city to outlast at the Offers.
Hell's Kitchen Irish	Firepower: a free attack die on every Open Fire volley, invader only. Peddle sells Moonshine in your Wards.	Every kill-count card, where one extra die is worth a whole tier, and the deck prints them at rising body counts, so the same trait scales from a 3 to a headline 5. Note Plunder steals instead of killing, so it earns nothing on a kill-count Job; but it draws no Heat, which keeps your stake pool clean.

So What's the Optimal Play?

There isn't one build, and the first read is always the same: how much Influence do you have, and what is already on the street?

Your Jobs plan by board state

Where you are	Go for…	Because
Early, 6 Influence	The 1s, and only the 1s. Take one every morning you can. Bribe toward 8.	Stake 1 is free at 6 on a clean Heat Track, and the Logistics 1s ride Plays your brew engine already makes. The cheap tier is consumable and drains one way, so it will never be this easy again. Meanwhile the 7th and 8th markers are the real purchase.
Mid-game, 8–10 Influence, board stable	Your orphan Speakeasy 3, then one 5 in a lane nobody contests: Staten, or the Rum ladder.	At 8 a 5-Respect stake is free to carry, which is the moment campaigns become affordable. The orphan joint is in your own back yard and needs no fight; the Staten lane needs no rival at all. Take the uncontested Respect while the table is busy shooting.
Mid-game, board hostile	The Estate family: the Secure and Recruit cards.	Nobody can stand between you and your own Safehouse, so these still bank points when the map has closed and every fight is a losing one. They are the deck's shelter: the Respect that does not require a rival's permission, bought at the price of rebuilding your spawn point somewhere it can be reached.
You're ahead, 12+ Respect	Stop shopping. Stay on the street late, hold your stake capacity free, and deny the card that crowns the runner-up.	Holdings top out at 16 Respect (five Deeds and three Titles), and no crew can garrison all of it at once, so in practice every rival comes through the Market to win. That makes the Market the last chokepoint in the game, and at 10 Influence you can hold it shut for nothing.
You're behind, and the 1s are gone	Take the early Lay Low and rebuild the engine; hunt kill-count cards, not Seize cards.	Stepping off first buys the best Red in the city and the first Play of the Hustle, which is how a broken economy restarts. And when you do fight, remember the deed pays even when the raid fails: you don't have to win, you only have to kill. A losing crew can still bank 5 Respect on a suicide run.

The through-line: the Market is not a shop, it's a queue you pay to stand in. The skill isn't spotting the fattest card; everyone can see all of them, and that's the point. It's knowing exactly which morning to reach, and having climbed the Influence ladder far enough that reaching costs you nothing.

Part III · The Standoff

Guns don't win this war; Respect does. But the turf that carries your Jobs, Deeds and Speakeasies never comes quietly, which makes a loaded pistol the down-payment on the crown. The secret the corner boys never learn: most firefights are settled before a die leaves the hand, in the cold sum of who holds the better ground, and of who was caught flat with his Ledger spent. Because behind every fight sits the same census: fifteen Runners, one Boss, one Safehouse. Nobody can be strong everywhere, so the fights that decide games are rarely sieges. They're raids: three to five men, an afternoon, and a picket somebody left watching the shop.

Two Numbers Run Every Fight

Everything comes down to how many dice you roll and what kills. Dice = the Muscle Ratio, the same staircase as brewing: 1–2 mobsters roll 1 die, 3–4 roll 2, 5–6 roll 3, 7–8 roll 4, 9+ roll 5, the cap. Threat = the kill number, base 5–6, each +1 widening it to Level 4's 2+, five-sixths of every die. Threat matters far more than dice, because it multiplies every die you roll, and Threat is where the defender lives.

The Standoff: The Whole Game in Two Questions

When you Move onto turf a rival Controls, the fight pauses: the Occupier answers, then the Invader chooses, and keeps choosing until the Pin breaks.

The asymmetry that defines combat: the Occupier shoots first and adds +1 Threat from a Safehouse, but the Ambusher takes the fight's one Heat marker, so an Invader who storms a defended block draws none. Defence stays the strong position by a wide margin, provided the defender has a marker spare to fire the Ambush.

How Steep Is the Premium?

Below: an Invader (with Boss) storms the dearest door in the city: a Secured district (3 Runners, a Boss, and a Safehouse), spending up to 3 Open Fires. Note what a big raid really costs first: the Sweep caps any district at 5 mobsters overnight, so a crew of six or more must be massed with an extra Move on the day: one more Influence the defender never spends.

Invader's odds vs. a Secured 3-Runner + Boss + Safehouse district

Invader Runners	Attack Dice	Invader Takes It	Invader Losses	Invader Heat
3 (even numbers)	2	1%	3.9	none
4	3	8%	4.5	none
5	3	23%	4.8	none
6 (2× the garrison)	4	49%	4.6	none
7	4	65%	4.5	none
9 (3× the garrison)	5	88%	4.1	none
11	5	97%	3.8	none

Read the shape of it: even numbers is a slaughter (1% for the attacker), you need roughly double the garrison for a coin-flip, and triple for a confident take, and you'll bleed 4–5 bodies doing it. The last column is the twist of the first-shot rule: because the Secured defender Ambushes, he fires first and takes the fight's one Heat marker, so your raid on him is heat-free. Attacking an ambush costs you dice and bodies, not the law's attention; the Heat only lands on you when you shoot first, into an undefended block or a defender who Holds. A few guards genuinely do keep the peace: three Runners behind a Safehouse and Boss turn away a four-man raid nine times in ten. But count what the wall costs before you swear off the gun: a Boss, the Safehouse, and three of fifteen Runners, all standing in one district. This table prices the strongest block your rival owns. The next prices every other block he owns.

The Street Fight: the Raid You'll Actually Make

The fortress above is the exception, and the census says why: your rival can build it in exactly one district, and every other block he claims is watched by a picket of one, two, three men, or by nobody. So the fight that actually decides games is a flying squad of three to five against a picket, and that is a different war. In the table below the picket is live when it fires the Ambush, a duck when it can't or won't: Ledger spent, Laid Low, or choosing to Hold Fire.

Raids on pickets: no Safehouse or Boss defending, up to 3 Open Fires

Raid	Picket	Take (live)	Take (duck)	Raider Losses (live → duck)
3 Runners	1 Runner	75%	86%	1.1 → 0.6
3 Runners	2 Runners	37%	54%	1.4 → 0.9
4 Runners	2 Runners	59%	64%	1.3 → 0.8
5 Runners	2 Runners	72%	81%	1.3 → 0.7
3 Runners + Boss	2 Runners	84%	88%	1.2 → 0.7
4 Runners + Boss	2 Runners	92%	96%	1.1 → 0.6
4 Runners + Boss	3 Runners	60%	82%	2.3 → 1.2
5 Runners + Boss	3 Runners	78%	88%	2.2 → 1.1
3 Runners	3 Runners	6%	18%	2.3 → 1.5

Three reads. First, the picket war is winnable at modest odds: four Runners and the Boss over a two-man picket is 92% through a live Ambush, for about one body. Nothing here needs the double-and-triple arithmetic of the fortress; it needs your Boss and one man over. Second, the Boss is worth more than two extra Runners: three Runners with him (84%) beat five without (72%) against the same picket, because his +1 Threat multiplies every die where extra bodies only climb the dice staircase. The Sicilian who reads that row knows why Hit exists. Third, the duck column pays in blood, not odds: striking after the Ledger is spent lifts the take a little (a lot, where the odds were middling) but cuts your losses by a third to a half everywhere. That is the arithmetic behind striking late, and behind the Havana Kickback that re-arms your dusk (Part II) while the ducks are going home. One price keeps it honest: shooting a duck means you fired first, so the fight's one Heat marker is yours. Against pickets you always choose your currency: storm the live Ambush and pay in blood, heat-free; shoot the duck and pay half the blood, plus the marker.

Three Principles of the Street

Why the drawn gun beats the fired one, on the block where it's drawn. A rival who can read the table sees a Secured block with three guards as a 90% wall and goes around: that garrison earns its keep standing still, and the fights it wins are the ones nobody starts. But the wall's arithmetic stops at the wall. One Boss, one Safehouse and fifteen Runners can't stand everywhere, and a two-man picket deters nobody who brought five. So hold the rest of the map the way a card player holds a middling hand: knowing in advance whether this block is worth the raise, and folding it without grief when it isn't.

The Occupier's Playbook

When a rival crosses your line, run the read in this order:

Occupier decision: what to do when they Move in

If…	Do this	Why
The block is empty scrap you don't need	Fold	Keep every body. Turf is cheap; a trained crew isn't. Let them have the corner and make them defend it next.
The Track stands at four, or a Rat is loose	Hold Fire	Not for the odds; for the aftermath. Whoever fires first writes the freshest name on the Track; at four markers, the fifth, and the city locks down. Make sure the name is his: the Raid hunts the freshest name in reach, so even a raid he wins leaves him standing on your block, holding your barrels, the fattest door in the precinct when the Squads move, and deep in your turf with no Land-Connected Safe District behind him, his crew isn't scattered, it's arrested (Part IV). Never Ambush into that arithmetic: at four, the first shot is a confession, whoever makes it.
You want the block, have muscle worth firing, and a marker spare	Ambush	Worth the marker and the Heat it draws onto you: the +1-Threat first shot swings a contested hold 30–50 points and bleeds the raider even when the block falls. Those figures ride on real muscle, though. The Ambush is your dice, fired once: one die (1–2 bodies) averages under a kill whatever the bonuses, and a marker plus the fight's Heat is a fat bill for a scratch; a small crew Folds instead, unless the block is a crown it must keep.
Your Ledger is spent out, or you've Laid Low: a sitting duck	Hold Fire or Fold	No marker means no Ambush: eat the first volley and trade fire, or Fold and save the crew. Caught spent-out on a block you meant to hold, you hand the raider ~30 points of hold; the small mercy is that his opening shot draws the Heat, not you. The Duck Window below runs the timing.
You're unsure they mean to fight	Hold Fire (a bluff)	Not a combat move; a political one. It lets a passer-by leave without a war, hides your strength, and keeps your marker off the Track; if he opens fire, the Heat is his. Know the price: a rival you wave through has dodged your deadliest shot, and his word to keep walking is only a word.

Fold, Check, Raise: the Standoff Is a Poker Street

The Move onto your block is a bet, and your three answers are the three a card player already knows. Fold is fold: muck the hand, keep the stack, and the stack is your crew. Hold Fire is the check, and a check that traps, because seeing your hand costs him: to learn whether the block means anything to you he must Open Fire, at a marker a volley and the fight's Heat on his name, into return fire you make for free, forever, Ledger or no Ledger. Ambush is the raise, and raises are for made hands. At two dice it wins pots outright: the +1-Threat first shot swings a contested hold 30–50 points. At one die it's the greenhorn's tell: a two-man picket's Ambush kills half a raider on average and moves the outcome about five points, and you paid a marker and took the fight's Heat to do it. Weak hands check or fold. Strong hands raise.

And remember you play this street with your chips face up. The Ledger is public: a spent one tells the whole table the raise is off, which is the entire Duck Window below: a duck isn't just weak, he is known weak, and known weakness invites the bet. What stays hidden is intent. A full Ledger Holding Fire says only "maybe I'm saving it," and the raider must price whether your picket is a corner you'll muck or a crown you'll re-raise over two more volleys. Cultivate that doubt; it garrisons blocks your fifteen Runners never visit. The one stack the table forgets to count is Rum: a Havana Kickback re-arms a dusk Ledger after every duck has gone home: the hidden chips behind the felt (Part II).

And the Heat Track deals this street its river card. The fifth marker ends the hand for the whole city (sirens, the Scatter, the Track wiped clean, Part IV), and the Raid hunts the freshest name in reach. So at four markers, Hold Fire stops being the humble check and becomes the coldest trap in the game: his opening shot is the fifth marker, and the pot he wins is poisoned. He takes your block and stands on it holding your barrels (the fattest, freshest door in the precinct), and the law arrives before the profit does. If he stormed in deep, with no Land-Connected Safe District at his back, the Scatter doesn't move his crew, it arrests it. Nor do you need to wait for the arithmetic: an unspent Rat is a river you deal on demand (Part IV), and Part V's liquor defense fattens the bait before he ever crosses the line. The invader's lesson is the same hand read in reverse: never fire first into a Hold at four markers. The man who checked to you may simply be holding the door open between you and the sirens.

The Duck Window: Timing the Lay Low

Duck status is a Ledger state, so it is transient: the morning refill ends it, and the window only runs from your last spent marker (or your Lay Low) to the end of the Day. What decides the risk is how much street is left when it opens, so count the Ledgers still in play before you step off. A raid needs a Move to cross the line and a marker for every volley after, and losing the Ambush never meant losing the fight: the garrison still returns fire, Safehouse and Boss bonuses intact. A rival down to one marker cannot touch a defended block at all (he'd cross, stall at the Standoff, and Fall Back broke); two buy him a crossing and a single volley into return fire. So stepping off a Play or two early, behind garrisons, risks almost nothing. Stepping off at noon, behind blocks you mean to keep, while rivals sit on full Ledgers: that is how strong districts die, and it posts the ~30-point discount above for anyone with an afternoon left to spend. And know the line between the two duck states: spent out is not Laid Low. Running dry, even on an Ambush fired with your last marker, never sends you home mid-fight: an empty Ledger keeps returning fire for free and still takes its turn. The Standoff answer and every return volley are fought inside the raider's Play, never on a turn of your own, so even a crew that has gone home defends itself. If both crews leave a firefight broke, tomorrow's tokens fall in today's turn order.

One boss breaks that arithmetic: the one with Havana stacked at his Speakeasy. The Kickback (Part II) re-arms a dusk Ledger by up to +3 Plays, exactly after the ducks have gone home and nobody is left to answer for them. Five Rum, then a Move and volleys into blocks that can no longer fire first, is the sharpest use of the window in the game. He wears real Heat for it, but he is buying districts with markers nobody budgeted for. While that crew is still out, count his barrels, not his markers, before you claim your token.

The Beachhead: Armies That Don't March

Secure places your Safehouse in any Safe District for $500; the next Play hires there for a flat $300 per Runner. If a rival holds Ward Boss, add a $100 Union Fee per Runner paid to them. Five recruits therefore cost $1,500, or $2,000 under a rival union. Your own Ward Boss recruits stay at $300, while rival reinforcement funds your war chest.

That makes a Ward a timing target, and the clock is the Reckoning: the crowns only change hands at nightfall. Take the Ward the Day before you mean to mass recruit, let Stake Your Claim swing the Title, and tomorrow's hires come $100 a head cheaper while the rival's toll booth stands empty. The District must still be Safe, the old spawn point is abandoned, and an unguarded Safehouse remains a free takeover. The Standoff taxes armies at the door; the beachhead avoids the door, but Ward Boss may collect the toll.

The Four Mobs at War

Everything above is mob-blind. But no two families fight the same, and each bends the maths in exactly one place. The yardstick stays inside the Sweep: a Boss and 4 Runners storming the biggest garrison it allows (the same five plus a Safehouse), with 4 Influence to burn.

One assault, four crews (Boss + 4 Runners vs. Boss + 4 Runners + Safehouse, 4 Influence)

Invader	Takes the District	Rival Boss Dies	The Read
Baseline (no play)	0.4%	0.5%	At legal numbers, defence is a wall.
Irish – Firepower	3.5%	6.2%	One free die, eight times the take.
Sicilians – Hit	0.2%	69%	Not there for the turf. There for the man.
Vipers – Stealth (5-man cap)	18%	21%	No Ambush to eat: the best legal assault.
Knights – Torch first	0%	0%	A siege play, not a takeover (below).

Hell's Kitchen Irish: the only crew that fights above its weight

Firepower is a free attack die on every Open Fire volley (an invader's tool only: it never fires on defence, not even an Ambush), worth roughly a full dice tier. A legal five-man car into a Secured 3-Runner block jumps from 8% to 33%; mass Boss and 6 Runners on the day and the same door goes 49% to 81%. On their own turf the Irish defend like anybody else. Plunder is for soft stockpiles: against two unguarded Runners on barrels, one quiet volley lifts ~1.3 barrels for 3 Influence and zero Heat. Against a Secured stockpile it pays near six bodies a barrel: don't.

Sicilian Syndicate: the wall and the stiletto

Everyone else's garrison is capped by the Sweep at 5 mobsters. Untouchable isn't: a Sicilian Boss + 6 Runners behind a Safehouse holds 70% against the biggest raid a day can mass (10 men, 4 Influence), and Boss + 8 Runners holds 98%, because past nine defenders the attacker's five-dice cap cannot cut through Threat 3. The only check on that wall is that 15 Runners stretched over an empire leave every other border thin. Hit is the opposite tool: Move in, pay 2, the rival Boss eats the first hit (61–69% he dies, even into a full garrison), then Fall Back. Three Influence, and he loses his +1 Threat everywhere, pays 2 more to Rise, and skips tomorrow's Offers. You were never there for the turf, which is also the tell: a Don who reads the Syndicate massing next door can Rise out of reach for 2 before the car arrives.

East Side Vipers: the scalpel

Stealth deletes the Occupier's two best answers (no Ambush, no Fold), and it shows against thin turf: a five-man squad takes a Boss + 2 Runner + Safehouse block 74% of the time versus 27% marching in. Against a full garrison even Stealth fails (18%), and the cap's true price is the road it closes: five is all the Vipers can ever mass. Snipe thin blocks and lone Bosses; never lay siege. Tunnel fights no battles, but it robs them: the day a rival masses on your border, five barrels ride the rails home to the Safehouse, and the block he finally storms is bare. Spoils are half the wage of an invasion; the Vipers can have the till empty before the first shot.

Harlem Knights: buy your wars

No Knight play adds dice or Threat: in a firefight they are the baseline row, the only crew that fights bare-handed. What they own is reach. Skiff lands five men from any coast you control onto any other, so an isolated picket on the water is prey. And the boat runs both ways now: the Knights may Fold or Advance out of a fight to any Coastal Safe District, so every waterfront raid carries a return ticket: land, do the deed, and pick any harbour on the map to leave by. Two prices keep it honest. The skiff seats five and carries no barrels, and anyone who misses the boat is killed, so a six-strong garrison that flees by sea buries its sixth: the ordinary land Fold still saves everyone, and a defender should usually take it. And no boat outruns the law: never the Scatter's step. Torch is a siege tool: 2 Influence, a sacrificed Runner and Heat to burn the Safehouse, lifting tomorrow's assault on a Secured block from 11% to 29% until the rival re-Secures. Prep, not takeover, and it bites hardest alongside a dead Boss, because Rise no longer rebuilds the house: a decapitated crew needs two Plays and $500 before it can Recruit a single man.

So What's the Optimal Play?

• Defending: the fortress is real but singular: your one Safehouse, your one Boss and 2–3 Runners are a 74–92% wall. Build it where your win lives. Every other block is a picket, so decide in advance which pickets you'd re-raise over and fold the rest without grief.
• Attacking: storm a fortress only with 2–3× the garrison. But the raid you'll actually make is your Boss and 3–5 men onto a two-man picket at 84–92%, for about one body, cheaper still if you strike late, when his Ledger is already spent.
• Above both: combat here is opportunistic. The threat of your garrison does the standing work; the fights you start yourself, start against sitting ducks, and never with your own first shot landing the Track's fifth marker.

Part IV · Heat and the Law

Every chapter in this book keeps arriving at the same line of arithmetic, and the third term is the one nobody budgets for. The Heat Track is the only bank in the city where all four mobs keep their money in one drawer: five spaces, filling a loud Play at a time, until the sirens empty it back into everyone's pockets at once. Most bosses treat it as weather. It isn't. It's a machine with a trigger, a targeting system, and a refund policy, and a boss who reads them can aim the law the way he aims a gun.

What the Law Hears

Only four things in this city put a marker on the Track, and the discounts written into them are the whole strategy:

The loud plays, and the bulk discount hiding in each

The noise	When it draws Heat	The discount
Firing first	The first shot of a firefight, kill or not	One marker, to whoever fired first: the Ambusher, or the raider if the block Held Fire. However many volleys it runs and however many men fall, it's the same single marker, and that shooter is the name the law reads.
Extort	Always	One marker, however many Districts pay. $200 a District means the shakedown scales and the Heat doesn't. Extort wide or don't bother.
The Greed Tax	Unload or Peddle 4+ barrels in one Play, at any address	Three barrels is silent, forever, and it is silent everywhere: the premium room buys no discretion. The fourth barrel is what they can hear.
Torch	Always	None. Arson is arson.

And the silences matter more. The cheapest defence is the one you never fire: Hold Fire and Fold cost no Heat at all, and a wall that turns raiders away by reputation never spends a marker. Plunder is silent: the Irish steal barrels at gunpoint and the law shrugs. Move, Trade, Secure, Recruit, Bribe and a disciplined three-barrel sale are all silent. A crew that never fires a shot and sells in threes could play an entire game without one marker reaching the Track, and fourteen of the thirty-two Jobs make sure it never wants to.

The principle underneath that table: the law counts Plays, not corpses. One firefight costs one marker, whatever the bodycount; five skirmishes that kill one man each cost five. So when you must be loud, be loud in bulk: batch the noise into the fewest Plays the board allows, and bank the discount every time.

What Heat Actually Costs You

A marker on the Track came out of the same ten that fund your Ledger, stake your Jobs, and buy your crown, and it is not coming back at nightfall. The Reckoning does not clear Heat. Only a Raid does. So every hot marker is a rung off the ladder in Part II, this morning and every morning until the sirens. Two markers cooling and a 6-Influence crew can't carry a 1-Respect Job for free anymore; three, and their whole day is shorter than a kingpin's afternoon.

But note the one thing Heat does not cost you, because it changes the endgame: markers on the Track still count toward your ten. The win check counts your Influence wherever it sits: Reserves, Ledger, staked on Jobs, or cooling in a cell. The law taxes your days. It cannot touch your throne. A boss one Bribe from the crown does not need a cool Track; he needs a Reckoning where the count comes up ten, and the Track counts.

The Sicilian dial. Consigliere is the only Play in the game that turns the Track down: one Influence, one phone call, and any marker of the Syndicate's choosing goes home to its owner's Reserves. Read that again: any marker, anyone's. Cooling their own name is the obvious use. The other use is the one to fear, and it's in the Raid rules below: the law hunts the freshest marker, so removing the man in front of you from the queue re-aims the coming Raid at whoever stood behind him. The Syndicate doesn't just quiet the city. It decides who the city is loud about.

How the Raid Picks Its Door

The fifth marker lands, or somebody Rats, and the city locks down. What happens next is completely deterministic (no dice, no discretion), and that is the single most important fact about it, because anything deterministic can be engineered. Each of the four Squads, in the numbered Borough order on the board, does this: it looks at the Districts directly connected to it, inside its own Borough. That is its whole world. Among the mobs holding those districts, it hunts the one whose marker sits furthest right on the Heat Track; if none of them has a marker on the Track at all, it stays put. Then it picks the door: that mob's in-reach district with the most barrels (tie: the hottest boiler on the Borough's Pressure Strip), takes one step in, destroys any Safehouse, seizes every barrel, and scatters the crew. Then it squats there, an impassable wall, until the next Raid moves it on. When all four Squads have moved, every Heat marker on the Track goes home.

Three levers fall out of that paragraph, and they are the difference between a boss the law happens to and a boss who uses it.

Lever one: the law hunts the freshest name, not the worst one

The Squad doesn't count your markers. It reads the Track right to left and takes the first name it recognises: the most recent noise wins, however much older noise sits behind it. Three markers deep but quiet since Tuesday? The law walks past you to the crew that shouted this morning. One marker, placed last? You're the headline. So the discipline isn't "stay quiet"; nobody holding loud Jobs can afford that. It's be loud early in the cycle, then let your rivals shout over you. Every marker anyone else adds after yours is armour, and the boss who does his shooting the morning after a Raid, with the Track empty and four clean names behind him, has bought the longest quiet spell in the game: the whole table must out-shout him before the law comes knocking.

Lever two: reach is geography, and geography is yours to choose

A Squad's reach is one step, inside its own Borough. It cannot cross a Borough line, it cannot jump the water, and it cannot hunt what it cannot touch. Hold no district connected to a Squad and you are untouchable at any temperature: the hottest crew in the city, walking free, because the law can't reach the block you actually stand on. Read the board with that eye and the safe rooms light up: every district more than one step from a Squad, every district across a Borough line from one, and the whole of Staten Island, where no Squad is ever posted. The Staten lane from Part II isn't just uncontested by rivals; it is the one place in the game the law cannot follow you, which is worth remembering when your plan says "be the loudest crew in town." One caution: Squads resolve in Borough order, and a crew scattering from the first can land in the path of the second. When the Track sits at four, check your exits against every precinct, not just the nearest.

Lever three: plant the evidence, the decoy warehouse

You often can't stop the knock. You can almost always choose the door, because the Squad kicks in your most-barrelled district in its reach, and where your barrels sit is entirely up to you (the Vipers do the choosing at any distance: Tunnel drops five barrels from the Safehouse onto the chosen door in one Play, however far from home it sits). So when your name is going to be freshest (and a boss running loud Jobs always knows when that is), you build the bust before the law does: pick the in-reach district you can best afford to lose, and make it the fattest target on the map. Pile the barrels you were about to sell anyway. Keep the Safehouse off it: the house is $500, a Play, and your only Recruit anchor, and the Raid burns it for free. Keep the Boss off it. Then let them come: the cops seize the plant, padlock a corner you'd already written off, and march straight past the empire. The fee is the barrels (so plant cheap Moonshine, not Rum) and the prize is everything else. One refinement for the connoisseur: the Squad has to step off something to step onto your plant. Early in the game that's a starting Hotspot Speakeasy opening, and Part II already told you who's waiting outside it. One thing to mind on the way: the Squad padlocks whatever Still sits under the block it lands on, shutting that boiler cold until a later Raid throws it open, so build the plant on a corner whose brew you can spare.

Leave a back door, or don't leave at all. A raided crew flees on foot to one Land Connected Safe District; and if there isn't one, because every exit is rival turf, water, the Blue Wall or the map's edge, the whole crew is arrested and boxed. Note the trap in that: a Dock's sea lanes are no help here, so a pier with one land exit is a cell with a view. Even the Knights drown in it: the Skiff fights, it never Scatters: water saves you from mobsters, not from cops. That rule cuts twice. Defensively: never let a barrel pile and a dead-end share an address in Raid season. Offensively: the exits of a rival's likely bust are a thing you can quietly close. A Runner on this corner, a picket on that one, and the Raid you both saw coming stops being a fine and becomes a massacre. The law does the shooting. You just locked the doors.

When You Want the Fire

Everything above treats the Raid as a threat. Half the time it's the payoff. Every Heat marker at the table goes home, and the deepest refund flows to whoever banked the most noise: three markers cooling is three rungs of your ladder back in one breath. The doors open, because each Squad that moves un-padlocks its starting Speakeasy, its Hotspot Token and its 7-boiler, though a precinct with no Heat in reach stays put, so each Borough's premium room opens only as fast as that Borough gets loud. Once open, the Night Mayor can walk demand around the Borough. And the board rearranges: safehouses burn, barrels vanish, garrisons scatter into each other's path. The most violent Play in the game, and nobody pays Influence for it.

So the real question about the fifth marker is never whether it lands. It's who chooses the moment, because the boss who places it fires every consequence above with the board arranged his way: his decoy fat, his exits open, his rivals' barrels massed for tomorrow's sales. The catch is printed in Lever One: the trigger marker is by definition the freshest name on the Track, so the trigger man is the target, unless his turf is out of reach, his decoy is already built, or the marker isn't his at all (see Part V). At four markers the whole Hustle changes character: every loud Play is a finger on the trigger, and the boss with a clean position and a reason to want sirens should be racing to pull it first.

The Rat: A Raid on Demand

And then there's the clean trigger. The Rat Play fires an immediate Raid at any Track height, and here are its teeth: it places no marker. The Track stays exactly as the last loud Play left it, so the law hunts whoever holds the freshest marker, not you. A rival storms a block that Holds Fire, Opens Fire and kills three men, masses his barrels for the morning sale, and you drop a dime that same afternoon: he shot first, so the marker is his, his crew is in reach, his stockpile is the fattest door on the block. Not a defensive rule; a precision air strike, purchasable for 2 Influence.

Because the price is the Rat Card: −3 Respect and no second call, until it leaves you; and it leaves exactly one way, when a rival Rats it off you, free and on somebody else's schedule. There is no absolution to buy. That single fact is the whole gamble, and it makes the Card cheaper than it looks in the only way that matters: the books open at Reckoning. Nothing is deducted before then. So the brand is literally free until the night somebody could be crowned, and it prices itself, without a clock, a track or an escalation clause. Early, while the Respect pile is thin, it costs a number nobody is counting yet, and the deck's one Rat card pays back exactly what the brand charges if you engineer the bust onto a cold boiler of your own (Lever Three, run in reverse), netting the whole thing to zero. Late, −3 is a Deed and a half off a 15 you were reaching for. But "early or late" is the crude read. Four sharper ones:

• It is a bill, not a blackout. The Market still deals to you, the Jobs staked in front of you still complete, the crown is still yours to take. You owe one number, once, on the night the books open. So the question was never can I afford to Rat; it is how many Reckonings away is my 15. Far away, the Card is free. One night away, it is most of a Borough.
• A rat can still hate-draft. Part II calls the Market the last chokepoint in the game, because no crew can hold enough ground to crown itself and every rival comes through it. The brand no longer spends that veto: you can drop the dime and take the card that would have crowned the runner-up, on the same board, in the same week. That is what makes the Rat a late weapon at all: it hurts the man in front without costing you the tool you finish him with.
• −3 is a leader's ruin and a fourth-place rounding error. The number is flat, so it bites in inverse proportion to how well you're doing: everything to a boss at 14, nothing at all to a boss at 8 who was never counting to 15 this game. That asymmetry is the design. The Card drifts down the table as the night closes, because the only man who will take it off you is one who has stopped caring what it costs.
• Where the Card sits decides whether the table has a fire alarm. The only exit needs somebody else to want a Raid, and whoever takes it inherits the −3. Parked on a contender, it is a hostage he badly wants ransomed and no rival has any reason to ransom. Parked on the crew in last, it costs so little that he is in no hurry to move it on either. Either way the on-demand Raid is out of service while it sits there, and the man holding it knows exactly how long everyone else can wait.

Part V · The Table

Everything else in this book you can calculate. This chapter you have to play. The rules hand you two instruments (a handshake and an off-book cash trade) and one warning printed in iron: there are no shared victories. Every deal in this game runs out at dusk, every partner is a rival on a schedule, and yet the tables in the other four chapters keep saying the same thing: the man who plays alone pays full price for everything. Here is how to buy cheaper.

Why Deal at All?

Because tempo is zero-sum, and a deal moves it. When two crews trade something each values less for something each values more (your spare Mash face for his walk-away at the Offers, your $1,000 for safe passage through Brooklyn), the tempo they save comes out of the two crews not at the table. Every fair deal is a conspiracy against the men not in it. That is the whole theory of cooperation in this game, and it's why the strongest tables are never quiet: a boss who won't deal isn't being careful, he's paying retail in a city that runs on wholesale.

And because the leader problem cannot be solved alone. Respect is fully public (completed Jobs, Deeds and Titles all sit face-up) and holdings top out at 14, so every crew must come through the Jobs Market to win. When one boss reaches 12, the counterplay is written in Part II: deny the crowning card. But below ten Influence a hate-draft costs the drafter two mornings and days of rent, which no single rival can afford to pay twice, so the containment has to be shared. A cartel of denial, each rival burning one Offer in rotation, splits a crippling bill into three affordable ones. The same logic runs everywhere: the table can leave the leader's number in the pool for the Blowback, the Harbormaster can name the face that starves him, and the man with the freshest marker on the Heat Track can be handed to the law by a single phone call. None of it needs a treaty. It needs three bosses reading the same board and each doing the cheap piece. Do it early: at ten Influence the leader's denial costs him nothing and yours still costs you everything.

What Actually Trades

• Cash: The only thing that changes hands freely, off the board, any time. The grease in every deal below.
• Liquor: By Move; barrels left in a rival's District become theirs. The rulebook calls it a donation; it is also the sanctioned way to pay in product, and a barrel of Rum is $300–$500 and a Kickback, the richest coin at the table.
• The Mash: The Harbormaster names tomorrow's number for the whole city, and a face that fires an ally's boilers as well as his own costs him nothing. The cheapest favour in the game, and the easiest to collect on later.
• The Hotspot: The Night Mayor parks the $500 room where he likes each Morning Fix, one Borough at a time. Walking it over an ally's Rum, or off a rival's warehouse, is a favour with a sticker price and no Play spent; and where a Borough's count stands tied, the token is the Deed.
• The Market: A walk-away that frees a card, a claim that denies one, a morning's pick conceded. Priced in mornings, the scarcest currency there is.
• The queue: Stepping off early or hanging on late to hand an ally the token he needs. Free to give whenever your own evening didn't matter.

And one thing never trades: Influence. Your markers fund your Plays, stake your Jobs and buy your crown, and the game gives you no way to slide one across the table. Every deal above exists because that one doesn't: when tempo itself can't be lent, everything else becomes the currency.

The Handshake: Reputation and Sabotage

When a deal needs teeth, you shake on it where the table can see. Terms must be clear, and every deal dies at the end of the current Day. Kept: the deal simply completes, and both reputations walk away clean. Broken, for any reason, including somebody else's interference: the breaker takes a Welsher card, and it is −1 Respect when the books open, forever. The cards stack, and nothing in the rules removes one. A handshake costs nothing to offer and nothing to keep, which makes it the cheapest instrument at the table and the most expensive one to misuse. Four consequences follow, and only the first one is friendly:

• Promise only what you alone control. "I will not cross the river today" cannot be sabotaged: the only person who can break it is you. "You'll cross my Borough unharmed" is a promise about the whole table's behaviour, and any third crew can make a welsher of you with one Move. Word your deals as your own actions, never as outcomes, and read every deal you're offered the same way: who besides him can break this?
• A rival's handshake is a target. The card falls on the promiser however the terms fail, so the moment two rivals shake, sabotaging the deal joins your list of available Plays. Block the passage, shoot the man he promised to protect, rob the courier carrying the payment. One Move of yours, and a rival wears −1 Respect to the end of the game.
• Price the point before you promise. A Welsher card is a permanent rung off the fifteen you need, and unlike turf or Titles it can never be won back. A boss at 15 Respect who breaks a deal (or has one broken for him) un-crowns himself on the spot; the same card ten Days from the finish is nearly free. If you must promise on the night you mean to win, promise small, promise early, and promise nothing a rival can touch.
• And read whose word is cheap. Respect is fully public, so the price of a man's promise is always on the scoreboard: a boss one point off the crown will die keeping his word, and a boss ten points back, or one already wearing the Rat's −3, is selling paper the street has already discounted. Count his distance from fifteen before you count on his handshake, and count the Welshers already in his Respect pile: a serial breaker's word isn't collateral, it's confetti.

The Off-Book Sale: Arbitrage in Moving Markets

Moonshine and Rum both sell for $300 at any Speakeasy, and every Rum barrel pays its Kickback wherever it pours; only The Hotspot pays $500, and only for Rum. The chain now has four links: Still, Dock, Hotspot Speakeasy and Night Mayor. No boss usually owns all four; every missing link is a deal.

The Hotspot arbitrage

If you run Docks but a rival controls today's Hotspot, Move Rum into their District and price the handoff. They receive the $500 sale and its Kickback; you demand enough to beat the $300-and-a-Kickback your own Standard bar would have paid. The address is not permanent, so every agreement should name the day, Speakeasy and barrel count.

The Night Mayor's market

Night Mayor can create a trade without moving a barrel: put the Hotspot beneath whichever crew has Rum and charge for access, or move it onto your own warehouse and shut rivals out. Announce it before the Hustle: “Deliver three Rum here today and I'll split the premium.” The token is a one-day franchise, and what it franchises is the $200 uplift: the Kickback rides with the Rum either way.

The standing shop

A standing Rum shop still works: stock what you can sell, keep Boss and Safehouse elsewhere. Rum is a fixed 15-barrel pool, and Raids follow the fattest stockpile. A warehouse the token walks away from still sells at $300 with the Kickback (the tempo survives the snub; the premium doesn't), while remaining a Police target.

The strongest deal controls tomorrow's title. The crowns swing at the night's Reckoning, so today's turf trade is tomorrow's power: pay for the Ward that flips Ward Boss before tomorrow's recruiting, the Dock that flips Harbormaster before tomorrow's Mash is named, or the Speakeasy that flips Night Mayor before the Hotspot moves. Turf now prices the next day's labour, supply and demand.

Conspiracies: Aiming the Table at One Man

Every deal above is two crews splitting a profit. The deadlier ones split a victim. When the board hands you and a rival the same enemy, the cheapest Play on the board is often the one you make on his behalf.

Mutual targets: back his war for your prize

Two rivals lock horns over a Borough you don't want. Read past the Borough. If the man on the defensive holds a Dock, and losing it would tip the Harbormaster's crown onto your head (most Docks, Part I), then his war is your business. Post the attacker a bounty: “$1,000 if that Dock changes hands today.” Cash is free to promise and pays only on results, and you're backing a battle whose spoils you never touch: he takes the turf, you take back the dice. The trick is to want a different prize than the men doing the bleeding. They fight for the ground; you fight for what the ground controls.

Catching the leader: the cartel of denial, in moves

Part II says the crown is denied at the Jobs Market, and no single rival can afford that denial twice. Here is what the cartel actually does, once three bosses agree the leader has run far enough:

• Leave his number in the pool. Conspire to forgo a Red you'd each have liked, so the leader's firing face sits in the pool as the Blowback and bursts the boiler he parked his Boss on. Nobody fired a shot; the dice did it, because three men agreed not to draft.
• Rent the last man's morning. By the Reverse Snake (Part II) the last boss off the street picks the Market first, ahead of the leader. When that morning isn't yours, it's for sale: a cash bounty for lifting the crowning card out from under the leader turns your problem into another man's payday. He spends the stake and wears the denial, you pay the rent, and the leader watches the card walk.
• Pay a rival to strike the match. A cash bounty rents another crew's signature Play against the leader: hire the Knights to Torch his Safehouse (his only Recruit anchor), or the Sicilians to put a Hit on his Boss. Off-book cash is free to promise, and the man you pay wears the Heat, not you.
• Corner him, then call. Pay a rival to plant a Runner across the leader's one open exit, then play the Rat. A raided crew with no Land Connected Safe District is not fined, it is boxed (Part IV). You bought the lock; the law kicks the door.
• Sell his Rum back to him. If the leader is Rum-rich and Hotspot-poor, let him Move his Havana Rum into a $500 room you control, Unload it under your lights, and split the premium. He turns product into Respect's fuel; you skim the difference, hold the only door his good stuff can walk through, and read the shape of his plan off what he asks you to sell.

Put out a hit. The purest conspiracy needs no partner, only a wallet. When you and a rival are racing for the same Offer, don't out-run him, un-man him: post a bounty the whole table can collect. “$1,000 to whoever kills the Irish Boss today.” A crew with no Boss on the board skips The Offers the next morning (Part II), so the card you both wanted falls to you uncontested, and the killing was somebody else's gun, somebody else's Heat, and your money. The bounty is free to name; you only pay if it works. Post it late, though: you have just told the man to spend two Influence Rising the old don into the safest block he owns, and a Boss who moves before the guns arrive costs you nothing but the announcement.

The Frame-Up: Selling the Raid

Part IV taught you to aim the law at your own decoy. The same aim works on a rival, and a deal is how you take it. The Raid kicks the fattest-barrelled door in each Squad's reach, so the man with the biggest stockpile chooses nothing and loses everything, and where the barrels sit is a thing you can arrange.

• Frame a rival. Before you drop a dime, donate barrels onto a rival's block, fattening his District into the obvious target. Then Rat, or simply wait for the fifth marker to land: the cops walk past your empire and kick the door you stocked for them.
• The double cross. Move him liquor to sell, shake on it, and drop the dime the same afternoon. He masses the barrels for tomorrow's sale exactly as you asked; the Raid reads that pile as a confession, and you watch the cops break down a door you loaded. The Handshake even leaves you looking like a partner, right up to the sirens.
• The liquor defense. Run it backwards to guard your own turf. When a rival covets a District of yours and the Track runs hot, leave barrels on it and Hold Fire when he comes. He shoots first, so he draws the Heat in the taking (the freshest marker on the Track) and inherits the stockpile he just captured. One phone call later he is the loudest, richest man in reach: caught red-handed, holding your barrels, his own name freshest on the sheet. The turf you “lost” was the bait.

Specialist Services: Renting the Signature Play

Every family owns two Plays no rival can copy, and a monopoly is a shop. What your crew can do and theirs cannot, they will pay to rent, because the alternative is not for sale at any price.

• The Sicilians sell cool. Only Consigliere lifts a marker off the Heat Track and hands it back to its owner's Reserves. To a rival cooking loud and dreading the sirens, that one phone call is worth real money, and the Syndicate is the only number that answers it.
• The Knights sell fire and water. Their Torch is the cheapest way in the city to un-house a rival's Safehouse, and their Skiff puts five men on any coast in the city in a single Play and lifts them off again when the job is done. Sell both as weapons aimed at a third crew: the Torch burns his house, and the Skiff is the only navy for hire: a landing on whichever beach the buyer needs frightened, from a crew that can always get its men home. The Network was always a business; the customers are just other bosses now.

Price every one of these the way the loan sharks price a debt. You are not being generous; you are the sole wholesaler of a thing your buyer cannot make, and the seams of this book, the moments where one chapter pays for another, are exactly where that thing is dearest.

The Blood Oath: Politics with a Deadline

The team variant turns everything above up to a boil, because the Federal Crackdown Tracker puts a date on the politics: every Raid advances it, and at space 10 the table freezes, ranks by Respect, and marries 1st to 4th, 2nd to 3rd, permanently. Play toward that moment, not just through it:

• Your rank at the Sit-Down is a position, and you can play it. First place buys the weakest partner in the game; second place buys the balanced marriage. With the token on 8 or 9, a claim-late boss can sandbag a completed-Job-in-waiting for a morning (or sprint one home) to choose which wedding he attends. Both families race for the same 30, so every point you carry in is a point off the run: rank buys you a partner, but the Respect on your books buys you a head start. What you never get back is whose engine you're chained to, and whose home borough borders yours.
• The clock itself is playable. Raids advance it, and Part IV taught you to fire Raids on demand. A bottom-of-the-table boss who Rats is not just calling the law: he's dragging the wedding forward while he's still cheap enough to marry the leader. A leader enjoying the solo game keeps the city cool for exactly the same reason. And the brand is on the guest list now: the Sit-Down ranks on current Respect, so the Card in your hand at space 10 can drop you a place and change who you marry. Ratting your way to the wedding while wearing it is how you make sure you are the cheap fourth the leader has no choice but to take.
• Watch the honor you're marrying. No debtor can be crowned, and in the Blood Oath, neither can their Alliance. That fourth-place crew with two of Shylock's Marks isn't a bargain partner; he's a padlock on your throne until he's clean. The Sit-Down doesn't launder anybody, but the padlock has a price list, $2,000 a Mark, and cash crosses the table freely. Budget your partner's debts the way you'd budget your own. His Rat Card is a different animal: it doesn't bar the Alliance, it just quietly bills it 3 Respect on the night you were counting on his half of the total. Cheaper than a Mark, and far easier to forget.
• After the oath, the family runs on cash and cargo. Influence never crosses the table, partner or not, so the engine of the variant is everything else this chapter prices: off-book cash funds the Bribes of whichever crew has the cheap Respect in front of it, and Havana Rum Moved into a partner's Hotspot is the closest thing the game has to a legal tempo transfer, a $500 sale with a Kickback riding on it. The fine print of turf survives the wedding, too: his District is still Hostile ground, and his barrels are still his. Blood is thicker than water. It is not thicker than the rules.
• And the family has one throne. The Capo di Tutti Capi is whoever contributed the most Respect to the winning total. The variant's last joke is that the race never ends: help your partner exactly enough to win, and not one Job more.

The Whole Day at Once

Five chapters, one machine. Watch a single Day through all five lenses and the seams show: at dawn you choose a number, and the docks choose whether you meant it. In the morning you reach for a card, or pointedly don't, and four people read the difference. All day you spend tempo (on turf, on volleys, on one more hour in the staring contest) while the law bills the noise to the only account you've got. And at nightfall the queue you fell into prices tomorrow: dice for the committed, cards for the free.

Three Questions Before Every Play

Which clock does this advance? The cheap Respect draining out of the deck, the ladder from six to ten, or the slow boil of the Track. A Play that advances none of them is a Play a rival would pay you to make. What does it tell the table? Your Jobs, your Respect, your stake, your barrels and your Heat are all public; your intention is the only secret you own, and most Plays spend a little of it. And who hears it? Every noise has a bill, and the bill has a name on it: make sure it's the right name, even if it isn't yours.

Where to Go Deeper

The numbers in this book are reproducible. Run your own mornings in the Brew Simulator and your own matchups in the Combat Simulator; both are rules-accurate down to the mob kits. Read the deck itself in The Jobs Deck and the law itself in the Rulebook, particularly Heat: Playing with Fire and Cooperation: Deals in the Smoke. The single-subject guides this book was forged from (The Brew Engine, The Jobs Market and The Standoff) carry the full worked tables where this volume condenses.

Brewing and combat figures are Monte Carlo estimates (100,000+ trials) from the Brew and Combat Simulators, over the full v0.9.5 rules: Muscle-Ratio dice capped at 5; Threat from Boss +1, Safehouse +1, Ambush +1; occupier Ambush at Cost 1 (skipped when the Ledger is spent out or the crew has Laid Low); simultaneous Open Fire with the invader paying per volley; a firefight's single Heat marker going to whoever fired first (the Ambusher, else the invader); Muscle-Ratio production with communal Blowback and a four-player contested draft, barrels at the $300 Speakeasy rate and losses at the $300 base Recruit cost (excluding a rival Ward Boss's $100 Union Fee). Jobs and Heat figures are deterministic reads off the rules and the live card table, machine-verified by the deck's own audit tools (Ledger fill = Influence − staked − Heat, capped at 5, before Kickbacks; the co-firing stacks from tools/overlap_audit.py; the deck's hard rule that no Play fires two 5-Respect Jobs). All figures model each system in isolation: board position, table politics, and who's holding a grudge still decide whether any of it was wise. ♦ Moonshine Kingdom v0.9.5 · The Kingpin's Guide ♦