Gatsby

• Designers: Bruno Cathala, Ludovic Maublanc
• Publisher: Pandasaurus
• Players: 2
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30 min
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/46g9rnv
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Long Island, the early 1920s. A smooth jazzy tune plays while, glass in hand, Dorothy Williams and James Miller rival in hopes of drawing the attention of the legendary Jay Gatsby. Within the pomp of the high society’s dinners, they exert their influence to rally prominent figures of the American smart set, ready to do anything to climb the stairs to glory. In this game of power and appearances, how far will they go to get close to the American dream made man – Jay Gatsby?

Welcome to the Roaring Twenties! Gatsby is a two-player game in which you take on the role of either Dorothy Williams or James Miller, competing to spread their influence and draw the attention of the great Jay Gatsby.

On the board are three locations, each offering different opportunities to get character tiles: the cabaret, the finance center, and the racetrack.  In setup, character tiles are placed in the appropriate spots.  Additionally, in the cabaret, the 4 Cabaret tiles are randomly arranged.  To claim these characters, each player will take turns moving the action marker on one of the four action spaces — but not the one just taken by the opponent — then activating it.  

These actions let you place two influence tokens on one or two locations, allowing you to claim characters in different ways, depending on the location. In the cabaret, your tokens must form a continuous line from one side of the board to the opposite side or cover the four-star icons at the same time.

In the finance center, influence lets you climb up the track – if you can reach the space of a character first, you recruit them to your side.. In the racetrack, your tokens are placed in races, trying to be the player with the most tokens on that race line when it’s filled.

On all three locations, some special spaces on the board grant bonuses when you place a token on them: swapping two tokens on the board, forcing your opponent to take a specific action, or gaining a special action tile!

A player wins immediately if they control three characters of the same color or one character of each of the five colors. If all character tiles from a single location have been claimed before one of these conditions is met, the player with the most stars on their characters plus prestige points for Special Action tiles wins!  Ties broken in favor of the player with more Characters.

My thoughts on the game

Gatsby is a tight two player game that has players competing in three concurrent mini-games in a race to capture the right character tiles.  A few of the tiles are known from the start; but most of them are hidden – so you either have to get actions that let you peek at the tiles OR just cross your fingers and hope to get lucky.

Each of the competitions has a slightly different feel.  The red area is a twixt like game where you are trying to connect opposite sides of the grid.  It’s made a bit more exciting as there are plenty of actions that allow you to replace your opponent’s tokens with your own – so you’re never really ever blocked.   

The middle blue area is a simple race – just get to the objectives first.  However, the extra rule that you get to move two spaces if you are losing the race leads to some really interesting strategies.  Oftentimes you want to be one space behind your opponent so that you can use the leapfrog action to jump ahead and nip them to an objective.  It seems easy to do, but trust me, I’ve gotten myself in a number of bad situations because I somehow managed to sneak ahead or tie my opponent.

The final area is the trickiest – the horse race.  Here you have five different contests, each an area majority challenge. These contests move somewhat in slow motion as you often can only place one token per line on a turn.  Additionally, they can be unpredictable as these tokens can also be switched.

While you’re fighting in all three arenas, things get a bit murkier given the fact that it’s also possible to switch the people tiles.  Not only do you have to win the minigame, but you also have to make sure that you’re getting a tile that you need.

Admittedly, none of the three challenges is overly complex (or exciting), but having to balance your progress in all three makes for an interesting game.  It’s a bit unpredictable given some of the board actions that exchange tokens, and there’s a little bit of confrontational play, especially when you get to force the action choice of your opponent’s next turn.  Games are fast moving as each individual turn is just two short actions – and the complexity level feels right for the short game span.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral.
• Not for me… 

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/46g9rnv