RED

About this board game

RED is a three-player tile-laying game for a 20-minute session, released in 2011. Players build a shared arrangement of black, white, and red tiles, connecting groups associated with their assigned color.

Each tile has a background color and a differently colored circle, creating six possible color combinations. The supply contains five small tiles and one large tile for each combination. Small tiles are worth 1 point, while large tiles are worth 2 points.

Players take turns placing any available tile from the face-up pool onto the playing surface. Tiles must align to an imaginary grid, and, after the first tile, every new tile must be orthogonally adjacent to at least one small tile. Large tiles cannot be placed orthogonally next to another large tile, although they may touch at the corners. On the first turn, the White player cannot place a large tile.

• Players are assigned black, white, or red and take the matching counter.
• The turn order is White, then Black, then Red.
• The game ends when no available move remains.

Scoring rewards two different kinds of connection. Each player finds their largest connected group of tiles matching their border color, then their largest connected group matching their circle color. Multiplying those two group values produces the final score.

The highest score wins. If two players tie, the third player wins; if all three players tie, play again. RED also includes a variant for two players, while remaining part of the RED, BLUE, GreenGreenerGreenest trilogy.