LogFAQs > #963109710

57. Flamme Rouge

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/199478/flamme-rouge

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Simultaneous action selection, racing, hand management
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 30-45 minutes
First played: 2018
Experience: 2 plays over 2 sessions, 4 players
Previous ranks: N/A

Flamme Rouge has you controlling a team of two cyclists, competing against other players' cycling teams to win a race on a two-lane track. Your two cyclists, a sprinter and a rouleur, are each represented by a small, personal deck of numbers (from say 3 to 9 for a sprinter, or 4 to 7 for a rouleur), which tells you how much to advance once it's your turn. Each turn, all players simultaneously draw two cards from each deck and then choose one of each to play. During the reveal, these cards are resolved from the front of the pack to the back of the pack, and then the used cards are discarded for good.

There are a bunch of subtleties that make Flamme Rouge more interesting than "pick the highest number for all of your cyclists," or worse yet "just pick randomly." They basically all relate to the way the game attempts to represent thematic elements of cycling.

The first is that the course is not static - it has hills, and no matter how hard you're pedaling at once, you're not going to get that far up a hill in one go. So if you're around there, you're hoping to draw some mid-range numbers to get you over the hump. Trying to manage your cards so you are not wasting good cards going up and down hills is important.

The next important mechanic is the fatigue card. If no cyclist is directly in front of you at the end of the round, you're going to face wind resistance, which gives you fatigue. Like in so many other deckbuilding games, once you run through your deck once, you'll be shuffling the discarded cards to draw through again (though minus the actual energy cards you've spent on this leg.) The fatigue card only has a movement value of 2, so a fatigued cyclist will of course be a slow cyclist.

The final twist mechanic of Flamme Rouge is the slipstream. Not only can you use cyclists in front of you to shield you from fatigue, you can also take advantage of the air they displace. At the end of the card resolution, If your cyclist is exactly two slots behind the next-closest cyclist, your cyclist will automatically slip into the spot directly behind the one in front of it. This process happens from back-to-front - and any cyclist that is directly behind one that is being slipstreamed up will slipstream up as well.

Together, this creates a fascinating dynamic in the game where bikers will tend to cluster - none of them particularly wants to be first and not only get fatigued, but also let other cyclists piggyback off their hard work and catch right up with a slipstream. You'd rather try to sprint out so far that no one can slipstream you, but it's a long course. Finding the balance is tricky.

But then, while the game is interesting because of this slipstream mechanic, the second time I played it (and the only time I played it in 2021), the way everyone clustered into the pack kind of made the dynamic a little... uninteresting? It felt somewhat arbitrary the person who managed to pull out the right cards at the right moment. That could potentially have been the result of slow play or the wrong group dynamic; perhaps that outcome is actually pretty rare.

In most eurogames, a close outcome usually makes the game more interesting. It's sad when someone falls helplessly behind, and dull when someone takes an insurmountable lead. That won't happen in Flamme Rouge, but because of the nature of the theme, you kind of want a little more of that dynamic, especially late in the game. Perhaps this recent play was a little duller for not having it, and that's okay as well - I do seem to remember there being a little more excitement in the first game. But I do think it's still really cool on paper - an incredibly clever little game about trying to outmaneuver your opponent to gain the smallest of edges, and then relying a bit of luck at the end to charge to the victory.