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You want to spend as little time on an incline as possible, and you have to think a couple of turns before to try to hit it perfectly. The corners in Heat are similar to the hills in Flamme Rouge, and it also has rules for slipstreaming. The way this fatigue is handled is probably the most important part of Flamme Rouge’s design; the game is built around you having a deck of cards, from which you draw a small hand giving you some speed options every turn that tend to range from 4-8 grid spaces. Each team of racers (two riders per team) have a deck of cards for each rider and these determine how far you will move each turn. But the addition of the cards you draft, weather and road conditions, plus the ability to play in a championship, mean that Heat has a fair few more rules to get your head around than Flamme Rouge.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. All of this means that, on your turn, you’ll be considering what your opponents are going to do and then choosing a card to help you either get in position for the hill or allow you to slipstream.

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. Additionally the selection of games available, cards against muggles was a very hard game to find and I did not see it on many sites. Starting with the backmost pack of riders, check to see if there is a one square gap between that pack and the rider(s) ahead. The more fatigue you suffer, the more of these cards are added to your deck, the more likely it is you’ll then draw them into your hand and have your speed options limited in the home stretch.GMT’s Thunder Alley and Grand Prix being at the more complex end of the scale, with Snow Tails and Formula D being at the more accessible end. Each player chooses a colour and takes a pair of bike and rider miniatures, the player board, and the set of energy cards in that colour. It’s not terrible at 2 or 3 but it’s not great either, so go into this thinking it’s a 4-player game to get the best out of it. In Flamme Rouge, 2-4 players control a team of bicycle racers competing to be the first rider across the line as they wind through the streets and country roads of France. One thing I did struggle with was that all the cards are very difficult to differentiate as they all look so similar.

Each rider has a term (Rouleur and Sprinter) but I quickly adopted ‘sitting down’ and ‘standing up’ as the terms meant nothing to me. Flamme Rouge is a fast-paced, tactical bicycle racing game where each player controls a team of two riders: a Rouleur and a Sprinteur. However the track pieces are double sided and the inclusion of hills restrict your movement on particular sections adding an extra layer of tactical card play to the game.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.

So races aren’t as much about simply going as fast as you can, but pacing yourself, knowing when to conserve your strength and sit in with everyone else, and when to risk it by throwing down and surging for the win.So in this review, I’ll tell you what I think of Flamme Rouge in its own right, and also, compare it to Heat. You have two cyclists, your rouleur and your sprinteur, and you’re trying to get one of them over the finishing line before your opponents. 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. 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. 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.