Tour De Wollongong

Sorry it's been a bit quiet here the past few days. I've been playing more Flamme Rouge. And not bothering to document the games that much either. Anyway it culminated in playing a seven-stage tour with my wife and two AI teams over the past two evenings (a game takes less than an hour, so it's not too arduous).

We used the bot teams from the Peloton expansion. I don't own it but the rules are available online and you can substitute exhaustion cards for the special Muscle/Attack cards the bot teams use. There are two different bot teams - the Peleton (who stick together) and the Muscle (who play as seperate cyclists, but with their sprinteur getting an extra movement card the player version doesn't have). Muscle teams aren't too hard to beat, but the Peleton is trickier.

We used the six courses from the basic game, but I added a long (12 space) section of cobbles to the first flat race to make it interesting. The seventh course (which we ran in the middle) was a rejig of a Paris-Roubaix course I found on the 'net, and consisted of three sections of cobbles with a couple of short descents interspersed. I was using a simple scoring system (3 pts for a win, 2pts for second place and 1pt for third).

Anyway, experience told. Catherine has played a few times, but I'd spent the weekend running numerous courses against bot teams and had started to grasp some of the concepts of planning and hand management that the game required. I picked up a fairly easy win, but mostly via coming second in six out of seven races. I only won two. Catherine won three races, but failed to score any other places, and came third behind the Peloton team. In fact this was down to the last race, where her lead rider was photo-finished into fourth place by a Peloton rider; had their positions been reversed Catherine would have come third in the race and scored enough points to finish second overall. The Peloton team placed in six out of seven races, and won one of them. The conventional bot team came a distant last, with a single win and nothing else.

There's a new expansion coming out this year with proper rules for tours. 

In other new I've been doing a bit of reading, after acquiring a copy of 'The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History ' by Alexander Mikaberidze. This is a weighty tome, but very readable. Those that know me wil now that my knowledge of the Napoleonic era is somewhat sketchy, but this book has done a great job of filling in the gaps. It's a broad-brush history looking at the interplay of nations and events between 1792 and 1815 but on a global scale. Highly recommended.