Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
I love Flamme Rouge. I’m not sure if the Finnish-born cycling simulator is my favorite racing game, but there’s a non-zero chance it is. The rules are straightforward, you are often presented with difficult choices, and you have to make educated guesses about what everyone else is going to do. Better still, the end is almost always a tight race between two or three players, which keeps everyone involved.
While, as I mentioned, the rules for Flamme Rouge are simple, the game is not without its challenges. You have two decks of cards that you have to manage in a slightly counter-intuitive manner, and you have to keep both of your cyclists straight in your head. Add drafting and exhaustion on top of that, and it can often prove to be too much for younger players.
Flamme Rouge BMX is for the younger among us, and it primarily serves them by reducing the scale. Instead of a wending and winding path, one lap around this circular track will do ya. Each player now manages a single cyclist, rather than a team. The cards have been turned into tokens, which are drawn from individual bags. The track still features different types of terrain, but their effects have been simplified, and using them is entirely optional.
On a normal turn, each player draws three tokens and chooses one. Selection here isn’t particularly nuanced. Managing your position within a peloton isn’t half as important to BMX as it is in Flamme Rouge. You want to pick the biggest token most of the time, but the single-lane bits of terrain, the Swamp and the Canyon, occasionally ask children to make predictions about other players’ behavior. To require that of them all the time would be a mistake. Little bursts of cognitive load is probably for the best. This is, after all, meant to be fun.
These changes represent adjustments to the basic formula, figuring out how to condense, simplify, and accelerate the process. The only real change, the only fundamental alteration, is the Weather Die. In Flamme Rouge, cyclists draft off of one another. After all movement is complete, any cyclists with one space between them and the next player piece get to move forward one space. Here, that’s not guaranteed. The Weather gods must smile upon you.
I quite liked that. Kids don’t need games to be deterministic. The best adults don’t either, for that matter. The die adds not only a degree of unpredictability, but a tactile thrill. That die is enormous. Little kids have a blast rolling it. There are cheers and there are pouts. And at the end of the race, which only takes about 15-20 minutes, everyone sets up to go again. That’s what it’s all about.
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