Board Game Red Flags: When We Know a Game Isn’t for Us
We all have them: those little warning signs that make us look at a board game and immediately start planning our escape from the table.
This week, Chris and Tim break down their biggest board game red flags—the mechanisms, themes, design choices, components, and other telltale signs that can turn “Want to play this?” into a very quick “I’m good.” Maybe it’s a rulebook that looks like it requires continuing education credits. Maybe it’s a game proudly advertising 240 minutes of playtime. Maybe there are 47 different resources, an app requirement, player elimination, roll-and-move, or the dreaded phrase, “It gets really good after your first five plays.”
Of course, one gamer’s red flag is another gamer’s reason to immediately preorder the deluxe edition. Chris and Tim compare the warning signs that send them running, the ones they’re willing to overlook, and those occasions when a game manages to overcome everything they normally hate. How well do we really know our own tastes—and how many great games have we avoided because they checked the wrong box?
Then it’s time for Roll for Preview, as Chris and Tim take a look at some games coming to the table.
Chris: Food Chain Magnate: Special Edition takes Splotter’s famously unforgiving heavy economic game of hiring employees, marketing burgers and pizza, manipulating demand, and ruthlessly outmaneuvering the competition and gives it the deluxe treatment, with completely redesigned artwork, upgraded components, miniatures, and a new presentation. It’s still Food Chain Magnate underneath—just dressed like the CEO finally approved the capital-improvement budget.
Chris also previews Steam & Cheese, Alexander Rein’s upcoming expert Euro from Skellig Games, in which steampunk mice operate an increasingly elaborate cheese-making industry. Players use dice as workers, with both their colors and values affecting their actions, while transforming milk into cheese, upgrading machinery, filling orders, and importing spices by zeppelin. Finally, someone had the courage to answer the question: “What if an economic Euro were extremely serious mechanically but populated entirely by mice obsessed with cheese?”
Tim: Catvale: The Board Game with Claws! sends rival cats into a modular, ever-changing world where they explore, gather resources, build, complete quests, and occasionally settle disagreements in the traditional feline manner: conflict. It’s a strategic adventure-Euro hybrid built around a variable hex-tile world, dice-driven actions, and more than 100 adventure cards. Basically, cats finally get the sprawling civilization-building experience they always believed they deserved.
Then, in Roll for Review, we find out what Chris and Tim thought after actually getting games to the table.
Chris: Citadels Duel reimagines the classic Citadels specifically for two players. Rather than simply shrinking the original game, designers Guillaume Montiage and Manuel Rozoy rebuild its character powers, deduction, city building, and tactical interference into a dedicated head-to-head experience. Chris finds out whether all that scheming, bluffing, building, and backstabbing works when there’s only one other person at the table to blame.
Tim: Nucleum, from Simone Luciani and Dávid Turczi, is a heavyweight Euro set in an alternate-history 19th-century Saxony transformed by nuclear technology. Players develop networks, construct and power buildings, fulfill contracts, unlock asymmetric technologies, and compete to become the dominant industrial force. It’s railroads, economics, technology, and uranium—which is either an irresistible Eurogame pitch or several of our red flags from the main topic combined into one box.
Tim also reviews Rauha, a 2–5 player game from Johannes Goupy and Théo Rivière about restoring life to once-sterile worlds. Players draft and place biome cards into their personal grids, create combinations, attract Divine Entities, and carefully position their Avatar to trigger rows and columns of increasingly satisfying effects. It’s colorful, peaceful world-building on the surface, with plenty of combo-building decisions underneath.
So pull up a chair—but check the box for warning signs first—and join us as we figure out exactly what makes us say NOPE before the first turn even begins.
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