Grand Tour: Flamme Rouge Expansion

This long-awaited expansion for Flamme Rouge adds a campaign mode and other new ways to play.. It does not need, but benefits from, the previous expansions Peloton and Météo.

How To Play

The main content is the Tour (campaign) mode. Earlier forms of this have been released as downloads, and I’ve run them a few times, but there has been expansion and another editorial pass since then. A tour consists of 3 to 21 stages, where each stage is an individual game of Flamme Rouge. Starting positions are based on each team’s performance in previous stages; tokens are placed along the route, with green for flat sprints and polka-dot for hill climbs, and passing those points first will gain a bonus for the rider who does it. At the end of the stage, the order of finish determines a rider’s cumulative time, and each rider discards half their exhaustion cards and carries the rest into the next race-as well as jerseys for the leaders in each category, sprint, climb, and overall. (These are tokens that hook onto that cyclist figure, so everyone can see who’s the leader.)

Specialist Riders are drafted at the start of a game, one per team, and tweak the deck of that rider to make them slightly better. For example, a Grimpeur is a Rouleur who loses three each of normal “3” and “6” cards, but gains three special “3” cards to let them descend at speed 7 rather than 5 if you start their turn on a downhill space, and three special “6” cards that let them go up a hill at 6 rather than 5. There are twelve riders total, and two sets of cards for each.

Special Stages give some different modes of play: a Time Trial is run as normal but you ignore other teams’ riders for all purposes, then use the Tour rules to compare finishing times. An Extended Stage adds four more tiles to an existing stage, but allows recovery part-way through.

The rulebook concludes with some extended notes on track design, including converting older tracks for use as Tour stages.

Components

The box contains pads of overall tour records and individual team records, as well as six sealable bags so that decks can be kept separate over a long Tour.; and 21 new stages (each in 2-4 and 5-6 player versions).

There are also cards (paper-wrapped, hurrah, though the overall box is in shrink) for Specialist Riders, and tokens for Tour stages.

Four new track tiles include a Wide Finish that will allow for less blocking at the end of a large race (and is recommended for Tour stages). There’s also a Sharp Corner, which is one lane wide and causes a rider to crash if they have to cut their movement short (like rainy weather from Méteo), and two Roundabouts, which split the pack into an inside lane of three spaces and an outer one of five. This slightly complicates movement and slipstreaming, but the rules lay out the procedure quite cleanly.

Only the box cover and the track tiles have any new artwork, and it’s minimal but effective, with new artists keeping to the style established by Ossi Hiekkala.

Summary

Although it necessarily takes much longer than a single game, I think the Tour mode is the best way to play Flamme Rouge: the original game is essentially tactical, when to husband your energy and when to break away from the pack to go for the finish, but the campaign adds strategic decisions too. There can be something of a snowball effect as winners keep winning, but I’ve seen players pick the exact right moment to push for a stage win and come from behind to gain places overall.

If you already have and enjoy all of Flamme Rouge, I recommend this without reservation: there’s some extra complexity, but nothing excessive, and each of the new elements is well worth adding to your games for a bit of variety. In particular I look forward to seeing how the Specialist Riders affect tactics in a Tour.

Should this be your first expansion? Probably not. Peloton adds a great deal to the game, including six-player mode and breakaway starts, while having little complication, and you’ll get more from Grand Tour if you already have that (for example, some of the Tour stages use Peloton track tiles). Météo can be added to the collection at any point.