Board Game Red Flags! - Episode 590

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 adventu