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.
Flamme Rouge reliably comes up in any discussion of the best racing games. Ossi Hiekkala and Jere Kasanen’s design has been delighting players for almost a decade now, with its easy-to-teach rules, and quick races. The real secret to Flamme Rouge‘s success, I think is its perfect blend of strategy and luck. It’s designed in such a way that you have to work real hard to get mad. If things go well, you get a rush of dopamine, the thrill of the unexpected coming true. If things don’t work out for you, you and everyone else at the table laugh.
Flamme Rouge: Grand Tour introduces a campaign experience to this zippy li’l racing game. Thematically, it’s a natural fit. What is a season of cycling if not a campaign game brought to life? Structurally, though, the idea made me nervous. I associate campaigns with long, involved designs, and Flamme Rouge ain’t that.
Unsurprisingly, the designers and publisher lautapelit.fi are ahead of the curve. Tours are adjustable in duration. A full season is a whopping 21 races, but you can do as few or as many as you want, and packing the campaign up to resume later is as easy as putting each of your cyclists’ decks into provided labelled baggies. The rules load is minimal, with changes that can be summarized in only a minute or two. New players can be seamlessly brought into Flamme Rouge with the Grand Tour experience.
You are still very much playing Flamme Rouge, though now there are jerseys to be won. The first cyclist to reach the end of a massive straightaway and the first player to reach the mountains in each race get jerseys, which contribute to your final score at the end of the Tour. You can also choose to play with cyclists who specialize in particular skill sets. This adds a fun but approachable amount of asymmetry to the game. I wouldn’t say it gives Flamme Rouge more depth, necessarily, but there’s something to be said even emotionally for further individuation of the cyclists. I like feeling like my guys are my guys, y’know? My fellas. My dudes.
The real primary difference in game play is paperwork. At the end of each race, players record their race times and any points they got from jerseys onto individual score sheets, then some poor bookkeeper has to transfer all of that individual data onto the master score sheet. While it is daunting to look at, you settle into the master score sheet pretty quickly.
Your team’s performance carries from game to game, and your individual cyclists also carry Exhaustion. Throughout Flamme Rouge, cyclists at the front of any given group receive Exhaustion cards, low value cards that make it difficult to move much. In Grand Tour, cyclists carry half of their Exhaustion into the next race. Push as hard as you want, but know there will be consequences.
That’s the greatest success of Flamme Rouge: Grand Tour, and what makes it, for my money, one of the most successful expansions ever published. It painlessly introduces long-term planning into a game that was never quite long enough to allow for that kind of thing. In Flamme Rouge, it doesn’t matter if you finish in second by one space or by a dozen; it’s all worth the same. In Grand Tour, the closer the finish, the better you’ll do. You have two cyclists, but you only need one to win a race in Flamme Rouge. Here, both cyclists matter. It’s in your long-term interest to do well with both of them. Making a big push at the end of a race is still thrilling, but now it carries with it the real possibility that you’re setting yourself up to be too tired in the next one.
Grand Tour provides a new, richer, equally unobtrusive way to experience what was already a wonderful game. Somewhat counter-intuitively, I think this is an expansion for non-hobbyists more than it is an expansion for hobbyists. We in The Hobby™ don’t play the same game enough times for something like Grand Tour to really make sense. Normies do, though. They buy a game and play it to death. I love the idea of a family of four who plays Flamme Rouge once a week turning those sessions into a Grand Tour, building a story over the course of six months or even a year. I recommend this expansion for everyone who enjoys Flamme Rouge, but for groups like that family, Grand Tour is indispensable.
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