How to Go Meta on your Supers City-Wide Drug War

Most Superhero campaign cities are going to have their various gangs, organized crime families, and drug lords. And they all via for control of everything shady; gambling, loan-sharking, prostitution, drugs, armed robbery, murder, etc. And the heroes come up with all sorts of ways to put these mangy dogs down. But how effective are the PCs efforts, really? I'm not referring to tactics, what the PCs actually do, but what happens as a result of the PCs smashing up what was otherwise a violent, deranged, antisocial way of making a living. 

Most of the time it looks like this; so-and-so gang is fighting with so-and-so criminal family over the lucrative drug trade. The PCs arrive and smash both organizations beyond recognition. Yeah, the neighborhood is saved! And there is no major dealing, death and extortion in the bad part of town for a time. Until it is time to reconnect the PCs with the criminal underground and the GM provides  drug-dealing city criminals to replace the ones previously vanquished. 

Another common tactic of PCs with an ambivalent attitude towards drug use is to play for a reduced body count out on the streets. People are able to purchase what they want in relative safety and the love gang reaps in a Supers game is to beat hell out of the entire criminal underworld until you are down to just one player. In this scenario the PCs are trading leaving one gang in tact while all others are obliterated in exchange for being the "official" drug dealer of the city. 

But while the PCs eyes are off the local drug war ball these numerous urban blights, these self-spawning criminal gangs, are re-filling in the dark cracks and trying to get back in the business.

I wanted to come up with a mini-game to meta-game the overall drug war between the gangs of Capitol City to determine which one is coming on top, on the rise, and posing the greatest threat to the PCs.

My eyes fell on my copy of the satiric card game Grass.  It is a point-scoring game with protection cards and different types of "hazard" cards. The dealer who makes $250,000 first wins. So that is how you get multiple rounds of play as a hand has an opening and a close followed by scoring. Rinse and repeat. So the thematic coloring melded perfect for the exercise. 

I played four hands to represent 4 weeks of drug trafficking between 4 different "players". Each player was one of the primary gangs in the city. The cards have all sorts of thematic hazard cards so these made nice, punchy random events which could be noted down. Not very exciting. I have to say, I will not do it again. But I did get notes for a nice detailed timeline of events and relative cash asset values for each gang which I can use as needed. These stupid little things create elements which help make a living game world, but it is still a labor of love than something mind-blowingly cool.