“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”

~ Albert Einstein

The excitement in the air is electric as the leaders round the last corner and head for the finish line. Each team has used cunning and skill to position their sprinter for this moment, but only one has done enough to pull off the win!

Will your team lead from the front and risk exhaustion? Should you play it safe in the middle of the pack? Could you surprise everyone by striking from the back? Can you time your move perfectly?

Anyone can race, few become champions!

In Flamme Rouge race you have two bikes, both slightly different. You have your All-Round “Rouleur” and your “Sprinteur” who is generally slower but faster in short bursts.

You’re trying to win the race by accumulating the most team points from the relative finishing places of both of your team members.

Both bikes have their own deck of cards containing the number of spaces that the bike can move and each deck for each of your two bikes is different. You have a card to remind you…

Your part of the game is played on a player board with your 2 decks of cards…

Card Play

You draw 4 cards from one deck, put one aside face down and put the other 3 on the bottom of your deck FACE UP. When you do this for one of the bikes, you do it for the other one…

Once everyone has done this everyone reveals and bikes move in the order they are on the track… front to back.

You basically move a bike as many spaces forward as printed in its related card… easy.

The card you use to move is removed from the game, never to be used again so you have to be careful here.

After moving, bikes 1 space behind another bike move up to join them, then any bike at the front of one of these ‘Packs’ gain a Fatigue card which is just a generic ‘2’ movement card…

Lead a pack for too long and your hand soon fills up with more 2s than anything else.

Hills

One thing that changes movement is the Hills…

Red is uphill, blue is downhill.

Going uphill restricts your movement total to 5, downhill makes your movement a minimum of 5 regardless of the card you played.

When drawing cards you eventually come upon the face-up cards under your deck. When you do, shuffle these to a new deck and continue to draw.

On a round when a bike crosses the line the game ends. Everyone scores points for their relative finishing position, and most points win.

Flamme Rouge Positives

Very fun hand management game with a deck that gets worse and worse as the game goes on and your cyclists get tired…

The main mechanisms with the deck that gets worse, having a separate deck per bike, drafting, hills and fatigue all work together VERY well but aren’t complicated at all.

Flamme Rouge Negatives

It’s hard to tell your two cyclists apart. One is leaning forward and one is sitting more upright. They maybe need painting or stickers or something…

Summary

ANOTHER good hand management racing game that’s different from the rest.

Jesta ThaRogue