If your rider finishes on the track and there is a gap between them and the rider in front then you will draw an exhaustion card. It would have been nice if the art had been different in some way to the cards to make it more obvious. Flamme Rouge is a game about early 20th- century bicycle races, and I promise you, it is a lot more fun than that sounds. So now your sprinteur is hanging out at the back with no chance to slipstream and they get the double whammy of taking an exhaustion card. Each rider has a term (Rouleur and Sprinter) but I quickly adopted ‘sitting down’ and ‘standing up’ as the terms meant nothing to me.

As I said above I have no knowledge or interest in bike racing and I was a little worried that the theme would come across bland to me, I was mistaken. We aim to reply within 1 hour, however depending on the number of queries it may take us slightly longer to get back to you!The quick setup and easy to follow rules make you understand the theme and how the riders need to work together as a team.

If you are leading the pack or not close enough to be slip-streaming, each turn that player receives a fatigue card to that team member. The game has a built-in rubber-banding system that imposes stamina penalties on racers breaking away from the head of the pack, while at the same time providing small slip-streaming benefits to those nestled in behind them.

I have been told there is an expansion coming out soon and I would very much like to see what that adds to an already great game.

This creates a delicate, nudging tone for the opening half of a race, as players jostle to settle in amongst the pack and bide their time, waiting for the best opportunity to make their move. There’s little more to this game than drawing some cards and moving two plastic riders along a track, but the fact it’s so simple—and ties so elegantly into the actual strategies of competitive bike racing—makes Flamme Rouge one of the best racing board games I’ve ever played. Commanding a team of two racers, players launch themselves around tight custom tracks, jostling for position and riding the slipstream of others to propel themselves to glory or crushing defeat. One thing I did struggle with was that all the cards are very difficult to differentiate as they all look so similar. If a pack has exactly one empty square in front of it, the whole pack moves forward one space, creating a new pack.Flamme Rouge is a fast-paced, tactical bicycle racing game where each player controls a team of two riders: a Rouleur and a Sprinteur. Every time you’re handed a stamina penalty, though, you need to draw a card that will only move you two, and must add it to your deck. Starting with the first player, everyone takes it in turns to put their riders on the squares behind the starting line. The only other rules are for climbing hills which limit your speed to 5, and descending hills where the card you play will at least be worth 5. Players draft, select and simultaneously play cards depicting a distance the riders will travel each turn.

Movement Phase - In this phase the person who is first (if tied the person on the right lane gets the advantage) shows the card that has been selected and moves the rider that number of places. Flamme Rouge is a game all about timing, working out what your opponents are going to do, and dealing with a large dose of luck. Mountain Descents – If you start on a descent square (marked in blue) then the rider will move a minimum of five, even if you play a lower number.

That’s it, a quick set up and easy to follow rules makes this game easy to learn and it’s one that I enjoyed playing.