GAP

Base price: $18.
2 – 6 players.
Play time: 10 – 20 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2

Full disclosure: A review copy of GAP was provided by Arcane Wonders.

It’s that time of the week again! More reviews of games coming down the pipeline. There’s a certain rhythm to it all, though that rhythm has lately been completely thrown off by me getting back into Hades, a game that I dearly love. Unfortunately, me getting back into Hades is a result of the Hades Gravity Theorem I’ve been postulating, which is if you watch someone play Hades, you really also want to play Hades. So far it’s been proven almost 100% effective in 5 distinct cases, where my friend was the effective Patient Zero (I was the first affected). Hades isn’t a game that I’d review in this space, so it’s been eating a lot of my maybe-I-should-write time. Alas. But I digress. Let’s check out GAP!

In GAP, your goal is to collect as many cards as possible! Sort of. You’d really like as many cards of one color as possible, or better yet, the largest number of sets of the same number of cards as possible. The gap is what will get you; the difference between your largest number of cards of a color and your smallest number of cards of a color. If it were easy to take cards, that would be one thing, but it’s trickier than you might expect straight away. Can you earn enough points to win without taking anything you don’t want?

Contents

• Setup
• Gameplay
• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Setup

GAP isn’t too rough to set up; you just need to remove cards at lower player counts:

• 2 players: Remove two colors (20 cards).
• 3 players: Remove one color (10 cards).
• 4+ players: Use all the cards.

After that, shuffle the cards:

Reveal four face-up in the center, and then deal cards to players based on the player count:

• 2 – 4 players: Every player gets six cards in their hand.
• 5+ players: Every player gets five cards in their hand.

You’re good to start! You’ll also need a way to keep track of points.

Gameplay

A game of GAP is played over multiple rounds as players try to hit a predetermined scoring target (usually 15, 30, or 70). Each round is composed of multiple turns, played until the players cannot play any more cards from their hands.

On a given turn, you just play a card. That’s kind of it. What happens next depends on the card you played. Determine the next steps in this order:

1. If the card you played matches any cards in the center: Take the card you played and all matching cards and add them to your tableau in front of you. Your turn ends.
2. If the card you played is “adjacent” (one more and / or one less) than any cards in the center: Take your card, one of the cards one higher than it and one of the cards one lower than it (if any) and add them to your tableau in front of you. Your turn ends.
3. Otherwise, if your card does not match any center cards and is not adjacent to any center cards: Add your card to the center. Your turn ends.

If, at the end of your turn, there are fewer than four cards in the center, draw and reveal cards from the deck until four are face-up.

Play continues until players are out of cards in their hands (you never put cards back in your hands). Then, scores are tallied pretty simply: you score positive points for the number of cards in the color(s) you have the most cards of, and you score negative points for the number of cards in the color(s) you have the fewest cards of. If you have the same number of cards in multiple colors, they all count for most or fewest. If you have 0 cards of a color but at least one card of another, the color you have counts for negative points, unfortunately. Tally your scores, record them, and start a new round if no player has reached the score threshold by shuffling the cards and redoing setup. If someone has, the player with the most points wins!

Player Count Differences

Player count isn’t that critical to GAP beyond what it does to the central card set; with more players, you’re likely to see more changes than you would with fewer players, as is typically the case. This means you can likely bet a bit on certain cards staying in place in a two-player game, but I’d caution you against relying on the center staying the same for too long in a six-player game. You’ll eventually hit some variant of the pigeonhole principle where you simply can’t place a card without taking something; that can happen pretty early in rounds since the card dealing is random, so it ends up mattering a bit more who is immediately before or after you more than what the person across the table is doing. I wouldn’t say certain player counts are “more” or “less” fun as much as they just have a different vibe in GAP, though, so you should figure out whether you want a bit more tactical play (lower player counts) or a bit more chaotic fun (higher player counts). Beyond that, no major preference!

Strategy

• If you’re risking it all, I usually recommend just taking a card to set a lower limit to your negative points. If you end up taking four of one color and three of another color (because you tried to get two sets of four or two sets of three and failed), you’ll only score the one point. Instead of that, try to just take one card of another color so you’ve got a floor established. It loses you a point, guaranteed, but sometimes it’s worth hedging your bets.
• Keep an eye on what your opponents have already taken. You might not be able to get certain cards anymore because they have them, for instance, or it might be worth going after colors they haven’t grabbed so that you have a better shot of getting a big set of that color.
• Some cards might be unattainable for you; worth keeping that in mind. Not just because your opponents have them, but because, say, you’ve already taken the cards that would be adjacent to that number and you don’t have any matches. Some cards will just be out of reach each round; plan accordingly.
• Getting sets of the same number of cards is always a good idea, unless they’re sets of your smallest number of cards. It essentially doubles you up on points, positive or negative, so it’s worth being wise about which ones you take and which sets you go after. You don’t really want to take a three-card set and two two-card sets, for instance.
• Keep in mind that there’s a priority to how you take cards, and you always take matching cards before adjacent ones. Players usually mess this up, and that can negatively affect your strategy. Taking every matching card can be a bummer, unless there aren’t many, but going for no matches and then taking adjacent cards can be great! Good way to get a lot of cards in one color (or a variety of cards in different colors if you want that for some reason).
• Sometimes you’re just gonna get screwed. The last turn is usually messy; sometimes the exact worst card for you gets played and you just end up taking a lot of stuff you don’t want (and a lot of negative points as a result). There’s not a ton you can do about that, short of aggressive card counting and prediction, but I don’t think most players will want to play with you again if you’re doing that sort of stuff for a short card game.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• The art is very striking! GAP is fun and colorful and looks great. I particularly like the reflective shine on the cards, even though, frankly, it makes them harder to photograph. I also appreciate the use of symbols to help better distinguish between colors.
• Plays pretty quickly, which is nice. I always enjoy a fast little card game.
• Portability is good too! The nice thing about pure tiny card games is that they fit so nicely in any kind of storage. Purse, backpack, quiver; possibilities are endless.
• In general, the core gameplay loop is interesting. I like having to manage which cards I take and how I take them with my ongoing tableau. It’s neat.

Mehs

• I’m not entirely convinced that GAP was the most informative name. I mean, you’re scored based on the “gap” between your largest and smallest sets of colors, but I think a lot of players initially think that the gap between the values matters more and so they play a bit weird in their first round, even if you explain that’s not the case in the rules? Might be worth going over a few times.
• I don’t love that there’s nothing to score with, but I guess they’re leaning into the classic poker deck kind of feel. I just feel like if we’re already imposing arbitrary round-based scoring criteria, being able to simply record each player’s score each round without relying on a phone would be nice. I guess it’s more sustainable not to, though.

Cons

• The last turn can result in some pretty “feels bad” moments since there’s just no getting around getting screwed on an unlucky card play. Sometimes you end up taking a bunch of negative points not necessarily due to another player’s planning but just because the wrong card comes up at an inopportune time and you can’t really do anything about it. That can be frustrating for some players, especially for a short game.
• There’s not really any way to come back from a particularly bad round, either. I suppose your best bet is trying to make sure that other players have bad rounds, but that’s not really a viable strategy for boosting yourself; it just helps you try to keep other players down, too. Especially in a game with a scoring threshold, it seems a bit silly to try and push other players into the negative.

Overall: 7 / 10

Overall, GAP is pretty solidly fun! I think it’s the kind of game that you see in that “quick and easy travel game” category that is just a generally good place for light card games to be. A lot of Oink Games end up here, mentally, and the very good and underrated PUSH from a few years back would be in this part of town, too. I will say that I slightly prefer PUSH just because of my love for pressing my luck (and my intense low-quality play in that genre), but that’s a different conversation for a different time. Here and now, GAP does a few things that I really like, mostly around art and presentation, and a few things that I don’t love as much, which are a fairly laissez-faire approach to ending a round (sometimes in a way that can lead to players feeling they got frustratingly unlucky) and a bit of a middling approach to helping players who are deep in the negative still feel like they’re in the game. Granted, this is why I only play the short version, but I imagine for longer games, it would be pretty frustrating. If I’m whining, I find the name slightly unintuitive, but my full review expands on that a bit more just from my experience teaching the game. These are in no way dealbreakers, though, and I’m always a fan of a quick and straightforward card game I can teach to my family on trips and the like. If you’re looking for that, you enjoy shiny cards, or you just want another game that’ll fit in your backpack, you’ll probably enjoy GAP! I have.

If you enjoyed this review and would like to support What’s Eric Playing? in the future, please check out my Patreon. Thanks for reading!