We study the critical behavior at nonzero temperature phase transitions of an effective Hamiltonian derived from lattice QCD in the strong-coupling expansion. Following studies of related quantum spin systems that have a similar Hamiltonian, we show that for large N c and fixed g 2 N c , mean field scaling is not expected, and that the critical region has a finite width at N c = ∞. A different behavior rises for N f → ∞ and fixed N c and g 2 /N f , which we study in two spatial dimensions and for N c = 1. We find that the width of the critical region is suppressed by 1/N p f with p = 1/2, and argue that a generalization to N c > 1 and to three dimensions will change this only in detail (e.g. the value of p > 0), but not in principle. We conclude by stating under what conditions this suppression is expected, and remark on possible realizations of this phenomenon in lattice gauge theories in the continuum.