by W. Eric Martin

▪️ At SPIEL Essen 25, Matthieu Bonin from French publisher Catch Up Games showed off the company’s planned release for the FIJ game fair in Cannes, France at the end of February 2026.

Red Notice is a two-player game from Baptiste Laurent and Gautier de Cottreau that you can think of as a tabletop version of the film Catch Me If You Can, with one player trying to cash a million dollars worth of counterfeit checks before being captured by the FBI agent played by their opponent.

Work-in-progress art and components, with the game box serving as a shield

To start, each player keeps a few forged checks from a random deal. Checks are valued at $100k and $200k, with the former having a flight bonus and the latter having an FBI ability. The forger starts in a secret location and tries to keep their movement hidden, although that will quickly become impossible.

Each round, players take the top three tokens from their stack of nine discs, with discs having values 1-5 and POW! They take turns placing tokens on one side or another of the four random action cards, each of which shows two actions.

You then reveal the tokens on the first action card, which for the round above was next to the forger. If only one player placed a disc, they take both actions, starting with the one closest to their disc; if each player placed a disc, then the player with the higher value does both actions, while the player with the lower value does only the action close to them. The POW! knocks out the opposing disc, giving the POW!er the chance to act.

Only one action played in round four as the FBI agent caught me

With these actions, you move around the maps, collect new checks, cash checks in hand, set up alarms, ban travel on certain routes, and trigger FBI abilities. When the FBI has a continent alarmed, the forger must notify them whenever they enter the continent; these alarms can be removed, but permanent alarms can also be put in place, with the forger then being forced to report entry into a continent and each movement within the continent. (You don’t reveal specific locations, but as in Scotland Yard and similar games, the detective will use deduction and other actions to try to pinpoint where you are.)

If the FBI agent catches the forger, the forger escapes by ditching one of their identities, using the powers listed on it. The forger starts the game with two of four or five identities, and after you’ve ditched your second identity, the next nab will be the last one, with the FBI agent putting you in jail permanently.

The FBI agent has two random abilities revealed, but if the forger gains the action, they get to discard the ability of their choice before the agent uses the other one.

Within a tight design, supplemented by 1970s-style art by Amélie Guinet that provides a nice atmosphere, Red Notice has a lot going on, with the main cat-and-mouse game being supplemented by how the disc placement action shifts from round to round. Initially, you have no idea what the opponent is placing, then in the second round, you know which three discs have already been played, and in the third round you know exactly what remains to be played — then you shuffle the discs for round four.

▪️ Maybe I need to carry a poster tube with me to SPIEL to take advantage of fun publisher bonuses like the one below. When else will I get a chance to adorn my walls with boors and wretches?!

▪️ I always appreciate the squiggly “technology” employed by Blackrock Games — French distributor of Catch Up Games and many other publishers — that raises box covers to eye level while giving passersby something curvy that will attract the eye, yet without taking up any table space. Seems ideal for a convention setting.

▪️ Blackrock Games once again stuffed a corner of Hall 6 with mountains of discontinued games, with many being surprisingly recent or massively discounted or both, as with 2023’s Evil Corp., 2024’s Zoomino, and 2023’s Gosu X…which brought forth a big sigh from me since I apparently adore this game far more than the market at large. After multiple iterations, perhaps this Kim Satô design has had its final chance.

At least I was able to pick up the game’s two expansions. Wait, a third expansion exists, too?! Oh, well, maybe that will pop up at SPIEL Essen 26…