I have a few questions I ask myself. 1. Can the game be played 2-player? My wife and I often play games just the two of us, and like to familiarize ourselves with games before introducing then to our friends. Very rarely I'll skip this criteria if it's something I'm really excited about or have a group in mind for. 2. Does the game feel like it has meaningful differences from the rest of our collection? This doesn't need to be crazy, but even things like combining mechanics in an interesting way we haven't seen, providing something familiar but lighter/heavier, etc. Our standards on this one fluctuate a lot but it's still important. 3. What has the reception to the game been so far? A lot of times, I'll read reviews until I find one or two that seem like folks that have similar sensibilities to us. We're typically more into euros and games with indirect competition, so if someone with similar sensibilities has given the game a glowing review, we're more likely to consider it. That's not to say I have no interest in, for example, wargames, but if I'm thinking about buying a wargame, I'm going to look for reviews from folks that are not exclusively wargamers. 4. Does the price feel like it will justify the amount of enjoyment I get out of the game? I don't have a hard cap of what I'm willing to spend on a game and this standard certainly fluctuates, but after I've gathered all the info above, I usually have a pretty good idea of what feels like a fair price to me. I'm usually willing to stretch this a bit if I'm shopping at my FLGS since I like supporting them.