You play a mob boss. You compete with your fellow bosses. Through careful placement of your “boys,” you control important locations throughout the city. But time is limited! Only three days remain for you to exert influence in the neighborhoods. Use these days wisely, because the gangster with the most influence at the end is proclaimed the boss of bosses! Beware! Your opponents seek the same raw glory. Take care, because if a gangster is invited down to the river for breakfast, he might not be around for supper!

Gather up your boys, hop in the sedan, and see if you have the skill, the
cunning, and the ruthlessness to become Chicago’s top Gangster!

Why am I all of a sudden thinking “Bootleggers!”?  Is it just me?

Ryan, I think you’ll be lucky if Gangster turns out to be as thematic as Bootleggers was.  Reading between the lines of Mayfair’s fairly ripe description, I’d expect this to be a reasonably abstract placement game, possibly area majority.  This feeling is strengthened by the designer.  Gimmler is quite talented, but his previous successes (which include No Thanks, Aton, Odin’s Ravens, and Thief of Bagdad) are very much in line with the typical German pasted-on themes that seem to leave you exasperated.

Mind you, Gimmler’s name is enough to have me check this out and given his recent track record, I have hopes for it.  But I’d be surprised if it had anything other than a surface similarity to Bootleggers.

I agree with Larry.  My sense is that this is an area-control game with some way of temporarily (or permanently) removing your opponents’ pieces from the board.

Not necessarily a bad thing, but certainly not AT-style thematic offering.

pk

I already own Bootleggers and the description seemed very similar.  I am more for the AT-style thematic bent, but I guess this game will have an audience with someone.

Yep, knowing Thorsten, it will have some new twists on the area influence genre, but those mechanisms are probably fairly independent from the theme.

The prototype for Thief of Bagdad,for example, actually involved moving ships to different Anatolian harbors and building houses rather than stealing treasures from palaces.

Yes, if I may be allowed to pontificate a bit, this is one of the dangers of viewing the gaming world through US-centric lenses.  I bet I’ll see a number of reviewers refer to this title as a Mayfair game.  In point of fact, it’s a joint release by Mayfair and Amigo and it wouldn’t surprise me if it had a stronger resemblance to the other items in the Amigo line than it does to Mayfair’s other releases.  This would be even more true if this was just an English-language remake of an Amigo title.  And yet, many reviewers and gamers insist on solely referring to such games as Mayfair or Rio Grande designs.  When it’s a German designer and an original German publisher, it’s pretty much a German game, even if an American publisher distributes a translated version of it.