Flamme Rouge

Each turn, for each of your two riders (a Sprinteur with a 9-card 'fast' deck and a Rouleur with a 15-card 'steady' deck), you draw 4 cards, pick 1, play it face-down, return the 3 unpicked to the bottom. The simultaneous reveal flips both your riders' chosen cards; the value (typically 2-9) is the squares moved. The repeated physical motion is fan-pick-commit-reveal — identical in cadence to Heat (the same designer's later F1 game), and the deck-thinning sensation as your good cards burn through is the signature feel.

Each round: (1) All players simultaneously draw 4 cards for each of their two riders, pick 1, place face-down; (2) Reveal all chosen cards; (3) Move riders in order from front to back, by the value on the card; (4) Apply slipstream — any pack with exactly 1 empty square ahead of another pack moves up 1 to merge; (5) Apply exhaustion — any rider whose square ahead is empty (no slipstream merge possible) takes a value-2 'exhaustion' card permanently shuffled into their deck. Cards played are discarded face-up to a recycle pile, only reshuffled when their main deck empties. End condition: first rider to cross the finish line wins; if multiple cross same turn, whoever went furthest. Tracks are modular tile-based with hill segments (cap downhill min/uphill max card values).

Per turn, you have 4 cards × 2 riders = 8 simple choices, but the depth is in pack positioning. The fundamental tension: lead the pack and pay exhaustion every turn, sit second in slipstream and ride free, or hold back saving high cards for the final sprint. Card-economy planning runs the whole race — you can count exactly how many 9s remain in your Sprinteur deck. Hill segments invert the math (a high card on a downhill caps at 5; a low card on an uphill jumps to a minimum). Decision space is small per turn but the multi-rider, multi-round optimization is rich.

Dominant skill is card-economy bookkeeping: exact awareness of which cards remain in each rider's deck and when exhaustion fatigue will hit. Secondary skill is positional game-theory — reading whether your opponents will push the pace this turn, slipstream-engineering the gap so your Rouleur drags your Sprinteur forward for free. This shows clearly in design lineage: Asger Harding Granerud's later Heat: Pedal to the Metal explicitly reuses the simultaneous-reveal commitment plus a deck-pollution exhaust resource ('Heat' cards there, 'exhaustion' cards here), refining the same skill expression for cars instead of bikes. No math beyond addition; minimal memory; opponent-reading and tempo are the differentiators.

Manage a two-rider Tour-de-France team — burn the domestique to drag your sprinter into slipstream, then unleash the final-stage attack at the flamme rouge banner.

Period-romance cycling illustration (artists Ossi Hiekkala and Jere Kasanen) — vintage cream-and-red palette evoking 1920s-50s Tour de France posters, hand-drawn riders and stage maps, deliberate echoes of classic cycling imagery. Distinctive shelf presence: the box art is instantly recognizable as cycling, like Heat's box is instantly recognizable as F1.