Flamme Rouge

The excitement in the air is electric as the leaders round the last corner and head for the finish line. Each team has used cunning and skill to position their sprinter for this moment, but only one has done enough to pull off the win! Will your team lead from the front and risk exhaustion? Should you play it safe in the middle of the pack? Could you surprise everyone by striking from the back? Can you time your move perfectly? Anyone can race, few become champions! Flamme Rouge is a fast-paced, tactical bicycle racing game where each player controls a team of two riders: a Rouleur and a Sprinteur. The players’ goal is to be the first to cross the finish line with one of their riders. Players move their riders forward by drawing and playing cards from that riders specific deck, depleting it as they go. Use slipstreams to avoid exhaustion and position your team for a well timed sprint for the win.

{
  "game_id": 199478,
  "name": "Flamme Rouge",
  "core_verb": "play movement card",
  "decision_shape": "mixed:probabilistic+spatial",
  "reward_schedule": "delayed",
  "aesthetics": [
    "Challenge",
    "Sensation"
  ],
  "core_loop_pitch": "Draft a card from your rider's deck blindly to move; manage exhaustion via slipstream and time the sprint.",
  "mobile_translation_difficulty": "Easy",
  "translation_difficulty_reason": "Simultaneous card selection and deterministic deck thinning translate cleanly to async digital play; light board state.",
  "direct_digital_port": null,
  "direct_digital_port_kind": null,
  "closest_loop_translation": "none yet",
  "primitive_tags": [
    "deck_thinning_via_play",
    "slipstream_adjacency",
    "exhaustion_card_pollution",
    "blind_simultaneous_select",
    "race_track_positioning"
  ],
  "confidence": 0.7
}

{
  "game_id": 199478,
  "name": "Flamme Rouge",
  "mechanics": {
    "core_verb_long": "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.",
    "core_loop_long": "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).",
    "decision_space": "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.",
    "skill_expression": "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.",
    "tactile_dependency": "low",
    "tactile_dependency_reason": "Cards are face-down/face-up information and the modular track is a 1D path with hill flags — both translate cleanly to a phone screen. The simultaneous reveal is the only dramatic physical moment and it animates well digitally (the same designer's Heat already has clones using exactly this UI pattern)."
  },
  "theme": {
    "promise": "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.",
    "setting": "historical, sports, Tour de France, early-1900s cycling",
    "narrative": "none — abstract race with strong thematic dressing. There is no story, but the Sprinteur/Rouleur role split, the slipstream-pack dynamics, and the iconic 'flamme rouge' (the red flag marking the final kilometer) are functionally accurate cycling — theme and mechanism are tightly coupled, far from pasted-on.",
    "audience": "gateway, family",
    "art_direction": "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.",
    "_designer_lineage_note": "Same designer (Asger Harding Granerud) later did Heat: Pedal to the Metal (2022), reusing the simultaneous-reveal + deck-pollution skeleton in F1 form."
  },
  "translation": {
    "digital_meta_layer_ideas": [
      "Tour-de-France season roguelite: 5-stage Grand Tour run with persistent rider stats between stages (legs sore from yesterday's mountain stage = extra exhaustion cards seeded), draftable team-manager perks between stages — directly analogous to Heat's Championship mode",
      "Async 1v1 ranked ladder: simultaneous-reveal works perfectly async, 30-second turn timer, ELO ladder with weekly track rotation",
      "Daily breakaway puzzle: fixed track + fixed AI peloton + fixed starting hand, score by finish position, leaderboard by hand efficiency",
      "Team-manager idle/tactics hybrid: passive team training between active races, gacha-style new rider unlocks with deck-shape variations (climber-deck, sprinter-deck, time-trial-deck)"
    ],
    "closest_mobile_genre": "roguelite deckbuilder / async PvP",
    "live_service_potential": "medium"
  },
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "extraction_version": "v3"
}