The game I discovered which had a similar mechanic to ours was Red Flags, a party card game created by Darin Ross and published by Skybound Games. I played using the physical card deck, which is the only official platform of the game, with a group of five friends. Red Flags is designed for 3+ players and centers on one player (the “single”) choosing the best romantic partner from a set of bizarre, sometimes ideal, sometimes horrifying, personality traits presented by other players. The target audience is casual, social players who enjoy improv-based humor and persuasion. I quickly learned why the only version available were through physical cards, as the experience of playing in person feels essential to what made the game enjoyable, as we were able to read body language, joke timing, and tone. It was a similar type of fun to playing Among Us live, where the format of communication (text vs. live speech) had a large impact on playability and tone.
The mechanics of Red Flags are as follows: each player uses two white cards (“perks”) to create an ideal date for the single. But then, an opponent places a red card (“red flag”) to sabotage that date. Players then argue why their date is still the best, despite the red flag, and the single chooses who they’d like to “go on a date” with. I chose Red Flags for this critical play because of this mechanic of constructing an argument under constraint, followed by subjective judgment, as this feels strikingly similar to the discussion and voting of my team’s game.
Our game, “Cabo Castaways” (title pending), also involves constraints and persuasion, but the core tension is hidden. Each round, all players must collect a real object around them in response to a shared prompt (e.g., “Find something you could use as a weapon”). But each player also has a secret constraint (e.g., “all of your items must be white”), and must defend their choice, most importantly, without ever revealing their hidden constraint to other players. The moderator chooses a winner, but other players can try to deduce someone’s constraint and steal their items as a result. This dynamic forces players to justify their choices creatively, while still bluffing and misdirecting.
In both games, performance under constraint is the heart of play. But where Red Flags centers on absurd creativity and humor, our game builds upon it in tension and deception. Red Flags rewards the boldest, funniest argument, there’s no penalty for revealing your reasoning too clearly, since everything is visible. In contrast, our game rewards subtlety. Say too much, and you risk exposing your constraint. Say too little, and you might not convince the moderator. Our intention is that with this, the stakes feel more dynamic.
I had an absolutely blast playing Red Flags, and as a sidenote, am grateful for this course as I would likely have never heard of it otherwise. Through this game, I got to experience this mechanic (improv discourse under constraints) play out in a game and see how different dynamics developed as a result. My experience with Red Flags highlighted how different styles of persuasion manifest across contexts. Some players used logic, others humor, and one friend leaned into deadpan delivery (e.g., at some point insisting that a partner who “screams their own name during sex” was just confident). These improvisational choices often won rounds not because they were the most convincing, but because they were the most entertaining. In fact, I noticed that the most extroverted players dominated the game, winning repeatedly not due to better arguments, but more animated delivery.
This dynamic reveals a limitation. Because Red Flags lacks hidden information, there’s little room for strategic nuance. Once the cards are on the table, the only thing that matters is delivery. This can marginalize quieter players, or those less comfortable performing. We hope to improve on this in our game as, while persuasion in Cabo Castaways is still central, the presence of hidden constraints gives quieter players a strategic outlet. Even if you don’t win the round, you might steal someone else’s point by correctly guessing their constraint. That layer of gameplay not only rewards attentiveness, it offers alternative paths to success. It’s not just about being loud, it’s about being smart.
In terms of game design, Red Flags functions around the formal elements of competition, audience judgment, and constraint satisfaction. But the game lacks internal feedback or structure to encourage variety- players often relied on the same types of arguments or fell into repetitive patterns. To attempt to mitigate this same dynamic, our game introduces physical action (searching the room), real-time constraint hiding, and layered consequences (winning vs. getting guessed) that help shake up dominant strategies each round.
However, the biggest insight that I learned from Red Flags was the faultiness of the voting system mechanic, which is identical to Cabo Castaways. In Red Flags, every player has the knowledge of how close every other player is to winning the game (by accumulating a certain number of cards). Thus, players would default to trying to prevent players with multiple cards from winning again. This bred the dynamic of (what I’m choosing to call) the “Dress to Impress” syndrome (DTI has the notorious problem of everybody voting each other 1 star, as there is no incentive to vote someone fairly- it would just result in you losing). There were times when playing Red Flags when the moderator/single would intentionally not choose a more convining/humrorous argument to prevent the player from winning. Our voting system is exactly the same, and every player will know how close every other player is to winning, so they would be incentivized to pick less convincing items in an attempt to keep the game going for longer. Playing Red Flags made me realize that our current voting system needs to be re-evaluated to promote honest and fair voting.
If I were to improve Red Flags, I would introduce a blind presentation mechanic for certain rounds. Instead of players verbally presenting their dates, all combinations of perks and red flags could be submitted anonymously and shuffled. The “single” would then read through each option without knowing who created which one, and choose the winner based purely on the content. It would also create a more level playing field for quieter or less performative players, reinforcing the idea that the game rewards clever combinations, not just charismatic delivery. Incorporating blind rounds would help Red Flags maintain its humor while expanding its inclusivity and fairness, values we’re also aiming to prioritize in Cabo Castaways.
Even though there wasn’t a required ethics prompt for this critical play, I couldn’t help reflecting on the ethics of performance and social pressure in persuasion games. Games like Red Flags rely on a shared social contract that allows players to be outrageous without consequence, but only if everyone feels equally safe in that space. For some, “dating game” tropes might be uncomfortable or exclusionary. Others may feel left behind if their humor doesn’t land, or their style isn’t dominant. Our game tries to address this by giving multiple ways to engage: persuasion, yes, but also strategy, observation, and misdirection. Ethics in games isn’t just about what’s said, it’s about who has the tools to succeed.
Red Flags reminded me how much fun it is to defend the ridiculous, but also how easily fun becomes exclusion if not everyone feels equally equipped to play. After playing Red Flags, I’ll work to have our game borrows the best parts, improv, debate, absurd constraints, but builds in mechanics that reward a wider range of skills and promote honesty in a way that current public voting systems lack.
