Flamme Rouge by Asger Aleksandrov Granerud is a wonderful cycling racing game for 2-4 people (or 1-6 people with Peloton expansion).
Photo by Oliver Schwarz in BGG
In Flamme Rouge, you control two cyclists — a rouleur and a sprinter — and for each of them a deck of cards. Both of them have a different deck but all the rouleur decks are the same across different players. Everyone starts with exactly the same resources and who wins is determined by a bit of luck and a bit of strategy.
Each turn, everyone draws 4 cards from one of the decks, chooses one of them to play that round and discards the rest. Then they repeat the process for their other cyclist. Once everyone has chosen, chosen cards are revealed and cyclists moved on the track based on the card values.
Once you’ve played a card, it’s gone for the race so your options get limited round after round. Even worse, if you finish a round without any other cyclists in the squares directly in front of you, you gain exhaustion cards that have a movement value of 2.
The exhaustion mechanic is where this game comes to live. You can’t always play the highest card you draw because you’ll eventually exhaust your cyclists if they lead the pack and eventually run out of steam at the end of a race. The perfect game plan is staying near the lead while taking advantage of slipstreaming, an effect that allows you to gain free movement at the end of the round if there’s exactly a single empty space in front of your cyclist before another cyclist.
More strategic elements come from downhill and uphill sections that modify the minimum and maximum values of cards you play. Meteo expansion adds even more fun with weather like storms, side winds and head winds that mix up the game play.
Flamme Rouge has become one of my favourite games and pretty much everyone has requested I bring it back the next time after they’ve played it which has surprised me since racing genre is not usually the most popular one.
The game comes with a variety of tracks (plus I have bought a few promo cards to add a couple more) but I’ve never gotten bored of any of the tracks myself because the gameplay is always different enough based on cards you draw and what other’s choose to play.
Same designer’s Heat: Pedal to the Metal is a spiritual follow up to this game and I’ve been wanting to get my hands on it for a while but haven’t added it to my collection yet.