The article below is a written version of a YouTube video I made talking about the design of Red Flag Over Paris: https://youtu.be/SkdiyuPefAg

In this article, I won’t go into too many details about the historical background. Still, if you are interested to know more about it, I published two articles on InsideGMT about this topic. First, I wrote about the Franco-Prussian War, and then I wrote about the Paris Commune and its implications:

The Terrible Year Part 1: The Franco-Prussian War

The Terrible Year Part 2: The Paris Commune

What you need to know is that the Paris Commune was a Socialist insurrection in Paris–not only an insurrection, and that’s the whole point. They formed a Socialist government in Paris, and they had the ambition of spreading across France. So, there were two conflicting governments: one in Paris and one in Versailles that came out of the February 1871 election. Those are all the elements of a civil war, even if it was contained in a rather small territory, Paris in its surroundings: competing governments, each of them having troops, each of them having different political agendas. It ended up in a blood bath during the Bloody Week in May 1871. Those events were a direct consequence of the fall of the Second Empire of Napoleon the third, during the Franco-Prussian War.

The purpose of this two part article is to walk you through the mechanics so that you can better understand how the game works. For those who already know Fort Sumter designed by Mark Herman, you will see a lot of similarities to that game in Red Flag Over Paris. That is not an accident. Mark Herman’s Fort Sumter was a significant inspiration for this game, and I used most of the same mechanics because I think it’s a brilliant system. There are spaces on the board, and those spaces are divided into dimensions, separated into two categories: political and military. Like in Fort Sumter you have four dimensions, and you take control of them bby taking control of each of the spaces contained within them. This is done by placing cubes in each space. If you have more cubes than your opponent, you control the space. Next, I will walk you through a sequence of play to show how it differs from Fort Sumter because there are significant differences between the two games.

The main idea of Red Flag Over Paris is to play through three regular turns and a Final Crisis turn, so it’s a pretty compact game. In those four turns, you will try to occupy dimensions to score points. Usually, at the end of the turn, if you control the dimension you will win a victory point. That’s the core mechanic of Fort Sumter. But in this game, it’s a little different. Each dimension gives you access to different kinds of victory points: political VPs and military VPs. So how does this impact the game? Let’s say you were in a situation where you control the forts around Paris. You would not win just any kind of victory point, but rather a military VP. This is not just a detail because it is linked to the asymmetric victory conditions of the two factions. The historical idea behind this is that the Commune never really had a chance of winning a military victory against the government in Versailles; the struggle was mostly political.

On the other hand, Versailles was trying to regain actual control over specific territory. So the two factions are not going for the same victory conditions. For Versailles to win, they must have more military VPs than the Commune has political VPs. Similarly, for the Commune to win, they must have more political VPs than Versailles has military VPs.

Let’s go back to the turn sequence. The game is played in three (or fewer) regular turns and a final crisis. You start a turn by getting four strategy cards and two objective cards. Strategy cards look like this:

All of the strategy cards represent either a critical figure or a significant event that happened during the Paris Commune. If you have already played a CDG or Fort Sumter, you already know how to play a card, but I will go through the core concepts behind it. Every card has a value which is represented in cubes. The color of the cubes indicates the faction of the card: blue for the Versailles government, red for the Commune, and both colors for neutral cards. The cards can be played in four ways:

1 – Play the card for its event (only if it has your player faction’s color, or neutral) and apply the text as written.

2 – You could play the card for its value. In this game, when you play a card for its value, you must announce whether you are using its value for military or political operations. If I go for military ops, I will only be able to use them in military spaces.

3 – Buy an event. Let’s say my opponent played a card of my faction for ops in his previous turn. I can discard a card of equal or higher value to buy that event and trigger it.

4 – Finally, burn a card to increase your player momentum. Usually, it is best to use a card with your opponent’s event because you get to discard the card at the bottom of the discard pile. There are two Momentum tracks: Revolutionary Momentum for the Commune and Prussian Collaboration for Versailles. When you do this, you gain one step on the momentum track.

Then you have objective cards:

Objective cards are all linked to a space on the board. For example, “Rise of Republicanism” is connected to the Republican space. Or Socialist International is related to the Socialists space.

At the beginning of the turn, you get a hand of cards: the strategy cards will enable you to take actions on the board, and the objective cards are connected to a space you commit to controlling at the end of the turn. If you do control that space, you will get an additional VP that corresponds to the category of that space, and you will have the opportunity to trigger a bonus event if you score it.

In the next article, I will explain three other mechanics: Player Momentum, Pivotal Spaces, and Initiative.

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