Post #2968710

The US Memorial Day holiday was spent with five of us doing two games of Flamme Rouge (my spouse and I have been doing our annual watch of La Vuelta Feminina this weekend), and then two iterations of a new to us game; Kardinal & Konig (or in the US; Web of Power). Flamme Rouge is a game we have played a lot of, almost always at higher player counts. We have watched a lot of cycling and I think it does rather well at modeling the event with one quibble. The track isn't a linear model of cycling races. The first few tiles are toward the beginning, but the last half of the tiles sort of represent the final 10km of what is normally a 70+ km stage. So there is a certain amount of getting your lead out prepped way earlier than anticipated that sneaks up on us. First game I had a a stroke of luck with drawing my exhaustion cards when I was descending, and took first (my sprinter took like 8th). Second game I sagged and drafted as much as possible only to squirt past with my sprint dropping the two nine cards in sequence to squirt across the line and take first. Web of Power is novel. I had a friend bring back a copy from a business trip they routinely take to Germany a couple years ago and it sat on the shelf for a while. We had trouble with the PDF on bgg so we used an older fan translation and comparing the rules later, we only had one goof; there is no turn order auction as part of the card play (and thus your ability to drive the game clock forward is less than anticipated, but that means we will likely have more pieces in the board and the mid/late arc of the game should improve.