Wouter & Ymke 
There’s something immediately appealing about a chase where one player knows exactly where they are and the other has to piece it together from whatever information slips through. In Red Notice: A Million or Prison, Angela Farbank is travelling around the world cashing fake cheques, with FBI agent Jessah Hope trying to find her before she reaches a million dollars.
Angela wins as soon as she has cashed at least $1,000,000. Jessah needs to catch her three times, first removing her two false identities before making the final arrest. Angela’s location is hidden and Jessah’s isn’t. Movement is only part of the game. Both players compete over the same actions, so there’s also plenty of attention going towards what the other person might be planning. Catch Up Games is bringing Red Notice to Spiel Essen ’26, and we had the chance to play it beforehand.
👥 2 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designers: Gautier de Cottreau & Baptiste Laurent
🎨 Artwork: Amélie Guinet
🏢 Publisher: Catch Up Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Angela tracks her position on a personal world map hidden behind the game box, while Jessah moves openly on the central map. Whenever Jessah enters a new city, she searches it for Angela. She can also spend a movement to search her current city. Finding Angela ends Jessah’s current action and forces Angela to use one of her false identities to escape. Once both identities are gone, a third capture ends the game.
Each round uses four action cards placed on a shared action board. Both players randomly draw three of their remaining action tokens and take turns placing them face down beside those cards. You can’t put two of your own tokens on the same card. Once all six have been placed, the cards are resolved in order.
If only one player chose a card, they perform both actions. If both players chose it, the token values decide what happens. The higher number gets both actions first, while the lower number only gets the action on their side. Equal numbers give each player their own action, with initiative deciding who goes first. There’s also a POW! token that cancels an opposing numbered token. POW! against POW! results in a draw.
The available actions cover movement, collecting cheques, banking and security, with wild actions standing in for any of them. Both players can collect and cash cheques. Angela needs them for her victory condition, and whenever she cashes one she has to reveal her exact location. A cheque can only be cashed from a city on the corresponding continent. $100,000 cheques provide an immediate movement, while cashing a $200,000 cheque gives Jessah an improvement.
Jessah can use security actions to place barriers on roads or radars on continents. Barriers stop Angela using those routes. When Angela moves into a city on a continent covered by a radar, she normally triggers it and later tells Jessah which radars were triggered and in what order, without revealing the cities she passed through. Angela gains security points instead, which can be spent to remove normal barriers and radars. Jessah’s improvements can add more security, make some of it permanent or provide more information.
After each round, initiative changes sides and the used action cards are discarded. After three rounds, all nine action tokens and twelve action cards have been used, so everything is shuffled and reset. Until then, both players can check what has already appeared and get a better idea of which tokens might still turn up.
Artwork & Components
Red Notice uses a colourful comic-book style with plenty of orange, purple, red and blue, thick outlines and halftone patterns. Little POW! and BIP! effects appear across the cards and tokens, and the box itself resembles an investigation board covered with photographs and documents. The world map gets fairly busy once Jessah starts placing equipment everywhere, but we never had much trouble seeing the actual routes or security tokens.
The part that caught us out was Angela’s personal map. We unpacked everything for our first game and started looking for a board that apparently wasn’t there. Eventually we realised it was printed on the back of the box. You stand the box upright in front of Angela, with the lid hiding the map from Jessah. There’s also a sleeve covering it when the game is packed away. We spent longer looking for that map than I’d like to admit.
Most of the components feel suitably chunky. The large orange and purple action tokens are plastic chips that are easy to handle, while both characters have screen-printed wooden pieces. The radars and barriers remain visible once the map starts filling up, and the cards carry the comic style through to the cheques, improvements and actions. There’s quite a lot of colour on the table, but the icons became familiar quickly.
Our Experience
We got the hang of Red Notice pretty quickly. My first few turns as Jessah were another matter. My instinct was to head towards Angela’s last revealed location, which resulted in quite a few searches of cities Angela had already left behind. After a few failed attempts, we started paying more attention to the routes around her last known position. Blocking one road or watching a continent often gave Jessah more to work with than simply following the trail.
With Angela, we probably spent too much time worrying about staying hidden. That worked wonderfully right up to the point where we looked at our cheques and realised we weren’t getting anywhere near a million. Eventually you have to cash something and announce exactly where you are. We had several moments where that happened and both of us stopped to look at the map, one counting possible escape routes and the other checking whether Jessah could get there. We didn’t always run immediately either. Once the other person expects you to disappear as far as possible, staying relatively close can become surprisingly tempting.
A capture didn’t always feel as clean as we’d expected. We’d find Angela, remove one of her false identities and then watch its ability send her somewhere much less convenient. The FBI paperwork must be terrible.
Most of our interaction happened around the action board. Early on we tended to use our higher tokens to secure whatever we wanted ourselves. Soon we were also spending them on cards because we thought the other person needed the action. That occasionally led to us reading far too much into a token placement that hadn’t been particularly deliberate in the first place. We also started checking which numbers had already appeared towards the end of each three-round cycle before committing what we had left.
We played both characters several times and never really settled on a favourite. Our games regularly stayed undecided until fairly late, with Angela approaching the million and Jessah looking for another capture. Afterwards we could usually point towards an action or route that might have changed the result. Whether the losing player’s explanation of how they were definitely about to win should be trusted is another matter.
Our Thoughts
I particularly like the overlap between the chase on the map and the action board. Having a decent idea of where Angela might be is useful, but Jessah still needs the actions to do something about it. Sometimes we spent a high token trying to stop something Angela wasn’t planning to do anyway. There’s enough uncertainty here that committing to the wrong idea can cost you a round.
Angela’s clock is money, while Jessah’s clock is power. Angela is mainly watching that total creep towards a million. Jessah’s pile of FBI improvements grows during the game, and Angela’s false identities gradually disappear. I found Jessah’s progression more noticeable for that reason. There are a few slightly awkward victories along the way too. Catch Angela and you’ve removed an identity, only to watch her use it to escape. Angela can cash a $200,000 cheque and get closer to winning, then hand Jessah another improvement in the process.
The random token draw is probably the part of Red Notice I like least. You don’t choose which three tokens you receive each round, the four available action cards change, and the cheques in your hand depend on what you’ve drawn. Sometimes you’ve read the other person correctly and simply don’t have a useful number to contest the action.
After a handful of games, the world map is familiar and you’ve seen most of what can turn up in the action deck. There aren’t new scenarios or characters waiting to be discovered, and I can see us eventually reaching a point where we’ve seen enough of it. Playing repeatedly against the same person adds something different. You start recognising habits. Does Angela usually move immediately after cashing? Does your opponent protect an important action with a high token? That suited us because most of our two-player games are played against each other anyway.
Most of the time we were looking at the map, the remaining tokens and, rather suspiciously, each other. We often finished a game, swapped Angela and Jessah, and played again.
📝 We received a copy of Red Notice: A Million or Prison from Catch Up Games.
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