The Board Game Gatsby Doesn’t Understand What Makes Fitzgerald’s Novel Great

By Keith Law | August 20, 2025 | 9:30am

Tabletop Reviews board games

The Board Game Gatsby Doesn’t Understand What Makes Fitzgerald’s Novel Great

Whoa boy, do I have a lot of feelings on Gatsby, the new two-player game from Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc, good and less-good. The game itself is pretty solid, although there are some balance questions near game-end, as players play take-that across three different mini-games with lots of bonuses across them. The title is just weird, as the theme has absolutely nothing to do with The Great Gatsby, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, other than some Jazz Age imagery.

Gatsby is a specific style of two-player game I’ve always thought of as a “fuck-you” game, because just about everything you do is aimed directly at your opponent, and will either come across as you trying to fuck your opponent over, or will make them want to say “fuck you” for the move you just made. Jaipur, still my all-time favorite two-player game, is very much one of these. Zenith, which I reviewed in June and might be my favorite new game of 2025, is another.

In Gatsby, there are three boards, representing the cabaret (red), finance (blue), and the racetracks (green), and players will place tokens on the red and green boards or move their single token up the blue board to hit new bonuses and push to claim some of the game’s character tiles. Those tiles come in five background colors, and there are three of each in the game, although there are only 12 of them out in any single play. You win if you get three character tiles of the same color, or one of each of the five colors; or, if all characters are claimed from one of the three boards, then players add up the stars on the character tiles they’ve claimed, and the player with the most stars wins. When the game begins, half of the tiles are face-up and half face-down; the latter are never revealed even when a player claims one.

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One of the big constraints in Gatsby is in how you take your turn: There are four basic move options, and you can’t take the same move that your opponent just took. One is to place two of your tokens on the red board, adjacent to any tokens already there and then next to each other. Another is to place one token on the red board and move your marker up the blue board. A third is to move your marker up the blue board and place one of your tokens on any of the five green racetracks that isn’t completed. And the fourth is to place two of your tokens on the green board on two separate tracks.

Gatsby board game review

The red board gives you a character tile if you complete a contiguous line of your tiles from northeast to southwest or northwest to southeast, or if you get your tokens on all four of the starred spaces at once. The blue board awards tiles to the first player to reach certain levels on the vertical track. The green board gives a tile to whoever has the most tokens on a racetrack when all of its spaces (three or five) are filled.

There are bonus actions all over the place, and this is where the game gets more interactive—and aggressive. You can force your opponent to pick a specific move for their next turn. You can swap any two tokens on the red and green boards, including between the boards, which can quickly shift the balance of power on one of them. You can take any two tiles from the board, face up or down, look at them, and then put them back on the same spaces, switching their order if you like. You can also draw a bonus move tile—the start player doesn’t begin with one, but the second player does—that offers a slightly more powerful move option than any of the base ones and that you can use at any time later in the game, although you can never have more than one in hand.

The mechanical complaint I have about Gatsby is that in trying to force an ending, some moves become too powerful later in the game. For example, you can use the spaces that force your opponent to choose a specific action to use one that can’t be completed, such as when only one green racetrack remains open, meaning they can only place one token rather than the two that would come with any normal action. Limiting your opponent to a specific action is powerful; cutting that action in half is punitive. I’ve also found over multiple plays that the red cabaret board seems to be underpowered—getting a straight line across, or getting those four starred spaces, is harder to accomplish than the ways you get tiles on the blue or green boards.

Then there’s the theme, which is about as pasted-on as it gets. The players are supposed to be Dorothy Miller and James Williams, and I switched their surnames on purpose because those are in fact not real characters in the book. The idea is that they’re competing in those three milieux to gain the attention of Jay Gatsby, which is definitely not the point of Fitzgerald’s novel in any way—Gatsby grew up poor, becomes a millionaire via illicit activities, and spends much of the book trying to impress various people and prove that he belongs in the social elite. The idea that these two fabricated characters are somehow competing to win Gatsby’s favor by doing the very things he does, without success, to impress Daisy and Nick and others misses Fitzgerald’s message completely.

So I’m half in love with Gatsby, which harbors a very good game under a mismatched theme, and could be a fantastic game with a little tweak to the rules here or there. It shines like the green light when you’re in the heart of a session, smacking the heck out of each other across the three boards as you try to box the other player in, and even though the theme doesn’t fit, the art by Christine Alcouffe (Paper Tales) is gorgeous and evokes the right era. I recommend it, with reservations, as we beat on against the current…

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.