Collectibles in New Bordeaux
New Bordeaux hides six collectible sets totalling 160 items: 50 Playboy magazines, 33 Vargas paintings, 30 album covers, 30 Communist propaganda posters, 12 Hot Rod magazines and 5 Repent magazines. Wiretap a district's junction boxes and its collectibles appear on the map once you zoom in.
Six collectible sets, 160 individual pickups, and a map that refuses to show you any of them until you do the wiretap legwork. Collectibles are the quiet completionist layer under Mafia III's district war — here is what exists, why it is worth the detour, and the one rule that makes hunting painless.
The six sets
| Collection | Count | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Playboy magazines | 50 | Classic issues with readable articles and centerfolds in the viewer |
| Vargas paintings | 33 | Pin-up paintings by Alberto Vargas, framed and hangable nowhere, sadly |
| Album covers | 30 | Sleeves from the game's licensed soundtrack roster |
| Communist propaganda posters | 30 | Eight distinct designs of era-correct agitational art |
| Hot Rod magazines | 12 | Articles on the period's race and performance cars |
| Repent magazines | 5 | Apocalyptic religious covers — the cult tie-in set |
That is 160 pickups total, spread across every district including the bayou shacks and the harbor. None of them are missable, and none are gated behind the story — the Playboy issues alone are collectible from the first hour if you feel like swimming.
The wiretap rule that changes everything
Collectibles only appear on your map once a district's junction boxes are wiretapped — and even then, only when you zoom the map in at least halfway. Every sector you wiretap permanently reveals its collectibles, shops, medicine cabinets and TL-49 fuse caches, which means the correct order of operations in any new district is: find the junction boxes first, then clean the map. The rackets page has the junction box count for all ten areas; Frisco Fields is the heaviest haul at eleven, Delray Hollow the lightest at five.
Once a district is wiretapped, hunting becomes a checklist: open the map, place a waypoint on each green icon, follow the distance meter (it shows above/below elevation too — invaluable in the French Quarter's courtyards), and use intel view up close, where collectibles are outlined like everything else. The Screaming Zemi is not needed for pickups, but it is excellent for pulling guards away from a magazine you spotted mid-racket.
Why bother: what collection actually feeds
Collectibles are not connected to the main story economy — no kickback, no earn — but they do three quieter jobs. They are flavour: the Playboy issues and Repent covers are deliberately period-accurate, and the album covers double as a soundtrack checklist. They are excuse-shaped: the hunt sends you through the map's best-designed corners, including the bayou island chains and the harbour rooftops. And they are progress markers for the achievement list, where the completion-adjacent trophies for exploration and investigation sit in the same lane — the Places of Darkness investigation in Sign of the Times (Haunted Places) and the three-fugitive bounty ledger in Stones Unturned (Skip Trace) are the same kind of busywork, with names attached.
Practical hunting notes
- Sweep rackets as you take them. Every racket location is dense with pickups, and the enforcers you are killing anyway make convenient cover.
- Playboy issues are named by month and year, which is how you tell duplicates from new finds (and how the official list is organised by district). Reading them in the viewer is optional; collecting them is not.
- Bayou Fantom shacks hold five of them — bring a boat, and mind the alligators, who are very much a documented hazard and have their own two achievements (eaten once, fed once).
- Post-game cleanup is fine. No collectible is sealed off by story progress, so a final map-wide pass after the endings is a perfectly good plan.
