This article is a written version of a YouTube video about the design of Red Flag Over Paris. In Part 1 I wrote about Political and Military Spaces, Victory Conditions, and Strategy Cards.

Player momentum is another significant aspect of the asymmetry in Red Flag Over Paris. As you can see, when looking at the upper part of the map, the cube economy is a little different in this game. On the one hand, the Commune has access to a lot of cubes, and on the other, the Versailles player has access to significantly fewer resources at the beginning of the game. The idea of a cube pool in Fort Sumter is that once a cube is removed from the board, it goes to the cube pool. The concept is the same here with a slight twist: Versailles’ cube pool is unlimited, but the Commune player does not have a cube pool at the beginning of the game. He needs to increase his Revolutionary Momentum to increase his operational capability to store cubes when they are removed from the map. This mechanic is an abstraction of the Commune’s need to maintain motivation in its ranks when they suffer an offensive from the counter-insurgent Government.

With the cube economy being tight, having cubes removed from the game has a major impact on how much flexibility you have as a player to take control of whole dimensions, especially during Final Crisis. If the Commune player increases his momentum, he will have access to more and more spaces to store cubes and have more flexibility in his influence cube placement during the game.

The Versailles player has another challenge on his hands. He needs to make sure he has access to more influence, in the form of cubes, that become available to him on the Prussian Collaboration track. This simulates the fact that, after the Franco-Prussian War, the Versailles government was quite weak, especially in the military dimension. Even though it had a lot of political control of the institutions and of the french country, it had a fragile army coming out of the war (see The Terrible Year part 1). This track represents the collaboration efforts of the government with the Prussian invader, that was also worried about the Paris insurrection. This gives the newly formed government access to prisoners of war that were captured the year before, ahead of the final peace treaty signed in Frankfurt in May 1871.

At the end of each turn, you score the dimensions after resolving bonus actions if you control a dimension’s pivotal space. Pivotal spaces represent areas that have a central role in a dimension: The National Assembly for the Institutions, The Press for Public Opinion, Mt Valerien for Forts, and la Butte Montmartre for Paris. Three different actions are available:

• Spread Influence: this action gives the opportunity to rearrange up to two of your cubes in the dimension, a good way to strengthen the control of a dimension.
• De-Escalate: this enables a player to decrease the level of tension in a dimension by removing up to 2 cubes in the dimension (at least one being the one from the player in control). This is useful when a player has a good enough hold of a dimension and needs to free-up cubes for the next turn.
• Turn-Coat: this action enables a player to replace an opponent’s cube with one of his. This is a powerful move that can flip control of a space. This action is inspired by the game Inis that contains an action card called “New Alliance” which is a powerful military card in that game.

At the end of a turn, if a player controls all spaces of a political dimension, he will win a political VP. If a player controls all spaces of a military dimension, he will score a military VP. Then, the objectives are revealed. If an objective is controlled, the player will score a political or military VP, respectively, depending on the category of the space.

To conclude this second part of my design notes, I’d like to cover the mechanic of Initiative in Red Flag Over Paris. Initiative in this game is represented by a card showing each faction on its two sides. This is an homage to a game series I love: Combat Commander. The Initiative card indicates which player controls the player turn order. At the beginning of the turn, we calculate the Initiative of each player, which is the number of political points the player has minus his Player Momentum. Let’s illustrate with an example:

• The Commune player has +3 Political VPs and a Revolutionary Momentum of 2
• The Versailles player has a Prussian Collaboration level of 1 (he also has -3 Political VPs as the point tracker shows the difference in VPs and not actual score)

In this case, this is how to calculate the Initiative level of each player:

• The Versailles player has -4 initiative: -3 for political VPs – 1 for Prussian Collaboration
• The Commune player has +1 initiative: +3 for political VPs – 2 for Revolutionary Momentum

So, the Commune player is ahead, which means he has the Initiative. Thus the Commune player will decide whether he wants to play first in that turn and keep the Initiative–which gives him a bit of a tactical disadvantage because being able to play a card last in a turn gives him a tactical edge–or leave the Initiative to Versailles by flipping the card on its side and forcing him to play first. But, at the end of the turn, the Initiative player will decide in which order dimensions and objectives are resolved. This can have a decisive impact, especially when you have to manage a very tight cube economy and you have limited spaces to store cubes. As soon as a turn begins, the Initiative player will have to calculate the trade-off between the turn order and the ability to control the turn resolution. Important Note: in case of a tie, the faction shown by the initiative card indicates the winner of the game.

I will talk more about this in the third part of my design notes to address two final concepts: cube placement rules in military and political spaces and how it mixes deterministic and stochastic approaches, and how Final Crisis is resolved (as it is quite different from Fort Sumter). If you have any questions, you can reach out on BGG & ConsimWorld.

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Red Flag Over Paris Design Notes Part 1: Political and Military Spaces, Victory Conditions, and Strategy Cards