Gatsby Review – Lavish party or lost love?

September 2, 2025

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A review copy of Gatsby was kindly provided by Hachette Boardgames UK. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

Bruno Cathala has been consistently making great games for years, so I was keen to take a look at his latest effort. Gatsby is a two-player tug-of-war fought on three fronts, with not all of them being equally good. It’s essentially three separate mini-games that you play at the same time, but with some really clever touches which mean the things you do in one of the games can influence the way the others look. It’s a lighter game, and that might not be what you’re looking for, but if you are, there’s a lot to like here. For the rest of us it might be a bit too hollow.

It’s set in the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. You play as the characters Dorothy Williams and James Miller, both striving to capture the attention of the titular Jay Gatsby. To do this, you need to do well in three areas of ’20s society: performances at the cabaret, climbing the towers of the financial district, and flexing your betting muscles at the racetrack. As you succeed in each, you claim character tiles from the board, with your goal being to collect three of a single colour, or one each of five different colours.

gatsby character tiles — The precious character tiles you need to claim to win.

You pick your actions from a choice of spaces at the bottom of the board, and there are some great opportunities to block the other player by occupying a space they want. This is more of an illusion of indirect interaction, though, because the game is so tightly contested that you can’t really afford to take a spite turn. There’s a cool bonus action you get to take sometimes, which means you get to tell the other player which action they have to take on their next turn, which is horrible to be on the wrong side of.

The Cabaret section of the board is the most game-like. There’s a randomised four-tile area with spaces to place your player tokens. You try to make a connection from the upper-left to the lower-right, or from the upper-right to the lower-left. It’s a bit like Tron’s light cycle game, or Snake if you’re from the Nokia generation. The big difference between Gatsby and either of those, however, is that existing lines can be changed, but I’ll come back to that.

Putting on the Ritz

Money talks for the remaining two sections. The central Financial district is the least interesting of the three. It’s a straight track with bonuses and character tiles to claim as you move up it. It feels like a part of the game you interact with more out of necessity rather than because it’s fun, but it has its place. Far more interesting is the last of the three sections – the race track.

race tracks from gatsby — The race track section of the board.

The race track has five races; lines with either three or five spaces on them to place your tokens. You have to place from left to right, and once a line is complete, the player with the most tokens on it wins the character tile at the end. I’ll be honest here, I have no idea what the lines represent or how they tie into the theme. Am I placing increasing numbers of bets on individual races? I’m not sure, and the rulebook doesn’t really help. It’s a board game though, right? Theme doesn’t always seem to have to apply too well.

What makes all three areas of the board the most interesting is the bonuses. Placing tokens on the board or climbing the financial track can trigger bonuses. Sometimes the bonuses are less powerful versions of the main actions, but even those can trigger additional bonuses, and making these combos work for you is the secret to winning the game. The most interesting bonuses are those that let you move player tokens. You place your tokens on the cabaret and the race track, but the bonus actions can let you either place more, or even better, swap the places of two. Those two can be from both players, and can be from different sections of the board.

The main board for gatsby — The board state at the end of the game. Short setup and teardown times in Gatsby.

Remember above, where I told you that the Snake mini-game wasn’t set in stone when a line becomes uncrossable? This is what I was talking about. A well-done turn can see some really cunning moves where you take a token from a race you weren’t really invested in, and swap it with the opponent’s piece from the cabaret, which joins two sides of the board and nets you a tile in the process. The final really fun part of the puzzle is the cards, which you can claim with some bonuses which give you your own, personal, usually-powerful action tile to choose. These are often weighted towards one specific area of the board and can really spice things up.

Final thoughts

Gatsby is a funny one for me. When I think about when I’ve finished playing it, I think “That was fine, not memorable, but good”, and it makes me think it’s just average. Then I think about it properly and realise I’m doing it a disservice. If Gatsby were a four-player Euro, I think it would have been too light, and not interesting enough, really. But it’s not, it’s a duel. It’s a 30-minute, three-way tug of war for two people, and it does this well. It’s not a game that heavy game players are going to get much out of, but families and couples getting into the hobby will enjoy it.

a close up of the cabaret mini-game — The snake-style cabaret board is by far the most interesting part of Gatsby.

What I really like about Gatsby is how quickly it gets to the root of the game. There’s no worrying about having enough resources to take an action, for example. There are no resources. The game is about using the actions available to you most efficiently to trigger the bonuses and combo into other things. It reminds me of Lost Cities inasmuch as there’s an odd number of things to choose from. Lost Cities has five card suits between two players, and Gatsby has three areas to fight over for two players. It means there’s never a case of just concentrating on doing one thing – you’ve got a stake in all of them.

What Gatsby reminds me of is a real back-and-forth fight of some kind. Depending on your age and demographics, you can think of it as a rap battle, an Errol Flynn duel, or, for me, the insult swordfighting from Monkey Island. As quickly as you take the lead somewhere, you find yourself on the back foot somewhere else, and keeping all the plates spinning is where the real heart and soul of the game is. It’s light enough to play with anyone (I taught my 12-year-old, and he got it immediately), it doesn’t outstay its welcome, and it encourages planning ahead. It’s just a shame that the financial minigame feels so hollow, and that I just don’t understand what I’m actually doing at the race track.