Tour De Covid - Part One

We are still in lockdown here in Wollongong, so there was no Thursday night wargames club for me this week. Catherine and I got Flamme Rouge out again, and we plan to run an ambitious 12-stage Tour, using all six teams - we will play one each and use the 'bot rules for the other four. I decided we'd use the courses that come with the game, with the first six stages being those from the base game (in alphabetical order), followed by Stages 7-12 from the Peloton expansion. These latter courses have versions for 5-6 players, whereas the base game ones don't.

Here's the base game courses.

So the Stage 1 was  Avenue Corso Paseo, which is all flat and therefore a simple sprint. To adjust the courses for six teams we added the wider start tiles, replaced a straight with  supply zone about half way around and inserted the small three-lane '9' tile near the finish. The aim is to do something similar for each of the following courses.

And here we are at the start. The Black team is the formidable Peloton bot, Green, White and Pink are standard Muscle bots, Catherine is running Blue and I am running Red.

Away we go. With six players you get a great spread in the pack, and lots of slipstreaming opportunities.

With the course being flat the pack stayed fairly tight; there were no climbs or descents to break things up. Catherine hung at the back waiting for the right moment to make her move. I decided to move up into the centre of the pack.

Halfway around we got a breakaway. 

Pink and Green were looking strong on this stretch ...

... but couldn't maintain the pace. Catherine and I both timed our final sprints to perfection, blasted through the main pack and ran for the finish.

We picked up the first four places. 

Whilst there are involved scoring systems on the 'net covering times and such things as points for climbs and sprints within a stage, we kept things simple - the winner got 12 points, second place 11 points and so on down to the last place's 1 point. So the two of us got off to a great start.

Stage 2 is Ballons Centrale. Because I led the pack at the end I had some fatigue at the start of this race, but burned it off with a cautious start, trusting to slipstreaming to keep me in the running.

Ballons Centrale has three undemanding climbs, each followed by a descent, so there was opportunity for the pack to break up somewhat.

The Black Peloton 'bot broke away early and soon had a commanding lead. They quickly dealt with the first hill whilst the rest of us struggled.

Black was still leading the way onto the second hill, whilst Catherine and I were now firmly at the back.

The second hill saw both of us with riders left straggling, whilst the pack caught up with Black. 

But Black still held the lead going into the final hill. As the pack bunched up at the foot, Catherine and I managed to catch up with our trailing riders, and I pushed my other rider close to the front.

The final sprint for the finish - Black seemed unstoppable ...

... but burned out! It was going to be close!

A win for Pink, with Black picking up second place. My rider also didn't quite have enough oomph to finish strongly, whilst Catherine shot from the back of the pack to pick up third place.

So after two stages Catherine has the highest scoring rider, with 20 points, whilst myself and Pink tie with 19 points for second place. Team scores are:

Red (Me) - 32 points

Blue (Catherine ) - 35 points
Green- 19 points

Black - 26 points

White - 19 points

Pink - 25 points

We have a commanding lead, but this morning I realised that we forgot to handicap our teams with exhaustion cards at the start. I will do this in the next race, adding two extra exhaustion cards to each of our four riders (in addition to the ones we've accumulated from the first two stages). That will probably see our lead eroded in the next couple of stages - Firenze-Milano and La Classicissima.