4 players and 40 mins.
Welcome to the greatest cycle race there is – the Tour de France! There is constant jostling to be at the front of the group, slipstreaming your opponents while doing your best to stay within the pack, conserving your energy.
As you see the final bend approach, you think this is it, time to give it your all – in a final push, your competitors and teammates surge forwards, drawing on what’s left of their strength!
How do you win?
Get one of your riders over the finish line first to claim victory!
How do you play?
Select one of the predetermined course layouts you like the look of and build the route using the interchangeable pieces. Each player gets a coloured placemat and two riders, a Rouler and a Sprinteur, with an associated deck of numbered cards for each rider which indicate their possible movements on the track. The Rouler has numbers 3-7, while the Sprinteur has 2-5 and a 9. Shuffle the deck for each rider and place each one face down on your placemat.
A round starts with all players drawing four cards from either the Rouler or Sprinteur deck and selecting one card to play, placing it face down, and doing the same for their other rider. Once every player has chosen their two cards, each rider moves forward the number of spaces shown on the corresponding played card, starting with the frontmost rider. But you will need to watch out for bottlenecks; if there is a pack of cyclists up ahead, then you may overtake them, provided that you do not end the movement on the same tile as another cyclist – otherwise, you’ll be blocked and will have to fall in behind them.
During the final part of a round, the cards are discarded and some bonus effects are applied. Slipstreaming allows a pack of riders to move forward one space for free if there is a gap of just one space between them and the next pack. Interestingly, since this is applied from the back of the course to the front, it can be applied multiple times to the same rider!
Once slipstream effects have been applied, the riders at the front of each pack collect exhaustion cards as they battle against air resistance! These are shuffled into the rider’s deck and have a low movement value of two, which will no doubt annoyingly pop up during future rounds and limit your movement as your rider succumbs to exhaustion!
The rounds continue until a rider crosses the finish line.
Why play it?
There’s a fair amount of luck involved, but you still have enough control over your riders to think up some long-term game tactics. The slipstream and exhaustion mechanics do well at balancing the game to ensure that the group generally stays together, but it’s not impossible to take a risk and go it alone with a rider, ploughing ahead and hoping nobody will catch you up! Unfortunately, on the flip side, if a lone rider falls behind, catching up with the rest of the group can quickly become a nightmare!
The different course layouts add to the replayability. As well as different bends, some have more or longer slopes, making the race more unpredictable. When travelling uphill, riders no longer benefit from slipstreaming and their movement is capped at five, no matter what value card was played. Conversely, on a downhill slope, all rider cards will be raised to a minimum value of five, opening up new opportunities to get to the front of the pack!
No matter how you play your cards, things always become tense at the last couple of corners as riders approach the finish line, with all players hoping to avoid exhaustion cards and draw a large number to take them over the line!
Verdict?
The simple rules and appealing artwork make Flamme Rouge an easy game to get into. Once you start playing, you’ll find it a lot of fun and quite competitive, yet strangely much more relaxing than you’d expect a Tour de France style race to be! A really lovely game.
Cards on the Table 