Spontaneous formation of fingered patterns during the displacement of dense granular assemblies was experimentally reported few years ago, in a radial Hele-Shaw cell. Here, by means of discrete element simulations, we have recovered the experimental findings and extended the original study to explore the control parameters space. In particular, using assemblies of grains with different geometries (monodisperse, bidisperse, or polydisperse), we measured the macroscopic stress tensor in the samples in order to confirm some conjectures proposed in analogy with Saffman–Taylor viscous fingering phenomena for immiscible fluids. Considering an axial setup which allows to control the discharge of grains and to follow the trajectory and the pressure gradient along the displacing interface, we have applied the Darcy law for laminar flow in fluids in order to measure an “effective viscosity” for each assembly combination, in an attempt to mimic variation of the viscosity ratio between the injected/displaced fluids in the Saffman–Taylor experiment. The results corroborate the analogy with the viscous fluids displacement, with the bidisperse assembly corresponding to the less viscous geometry. But, differently to fluid case, granular fingers only develop for a specific combination of displaced/injected geometries, and we have demonstrated that it is always related with the formation of a force chain network along the finger direction.