README.md

Introduction

This package of programs allows the moderation of games of Flamme Rouge by correspondence. The author has used it to run games on Discourse and BoardGameGeek.

Requirements

You'll need these non-core Perl modules:

• Imager
• List::MoreUtils
• YAML::XS

In Debian, install libimager-perl, liblist-moreutils-perl and libyaml-libyaml-perl.

For plot you'll also need inkscape installed; it's used to render SVG icons into bitmaps.

The programs

Most programs operate on a YAML file. You can give this as a command line parameter. If you don't, the program will search through the current directory and use the latest one it can find, working out the name of the next file if needed. The general format for filenames is (racenumber).(turnnumber).(actionnumber).yaml

Each YAML file is a snapshot of the entire state of the competition. All persistent data are stored there.

Because I don't want all these programs sitting on my path, I run them from the tour directory, as it might be ../plot. They make assumptions about this – for example plot is expecting to find its icons in ../icons/, and most programs load up ../tiles.yaml for tile details.

Courses are defined as a series of letters and numbers. a..t and A..T are the tiles from the base game, in lower and upper (white-on-black-square) case; Peloton tiles are shown as 1..9 for the black-on-white side, and ^1..^9 for the white-on-black-square backs. (The Brettspiel Adventskalendar 2017 promo tile is "%B" for the plain side, "%C" for the climb side; this hasn't been used in any published courses and the representation may change.)

addteam

Adds a team to the tour. Needs:

• -t team name
• -n colour name
• -c optional hex triplet colour rrggbb
• -1 rider 1 type (r, s, p, g)
• -2 rider 2 type

If you don't give a hex triplet, the colour name is looked up first in the standard Flamme Rouge colours and then in /etc/X11/rgb.txt. (Custom colours may be handy if you have players with colour vision deficits.)

Rider types r (rouleur) and s (sprinteur) are as in the standard game: Rouleur has cards 3..7 three times each (75 energy), and Sprinteur has 2..5 and 9 three times each (69 energy). For the Grimpeur and Puncheur see Player Briefing below.

analyse

Given either a YAML file with a course defined in it or a course directly on the command line, prints some information about track length, amounts of various terrain types, and warnings about areas where a rider can jump directly from one downhill/supply zone to another.

breakaway

Does all the custom breakaway calculations. No special parameters; it works out from the state of the decks how far things have gone and what still needs to be done.

endrace

Does the end-of-race calculations: scores riders for combativity over the race just finished, counts their exhaustion cards and works out recovery rates, and stores their exhaustion total.

energy

Draws energy cards for every active rider. With -b does a second-stage breakaway draw (i.e. only for the one rider per team who's active even though the others are on the track).

mover

Does the actual moving of riders. Follows every rule I can find. Prints various information about what's going on, which the players will probably want to see.

This will produce up to three YAML files:

• before slipstreaming
• after slipstreaming but before finishers are removed
• start of the next turn

place

Places a team at the start of a race.

• -t team name
• -r/s/p/g X (use twice): the lettered space where the rouleur/sprinteur/puncheur/grimpeur starts

Example: place -t Roger -r A -s D

play

Plays a team's energy cards.

• -t team name
• -r/s/p/g X (use twice): the card to play this turn.

If a team has only one active rider (e.g. in breakaway stage 2 or when the other has finished) you may use -x to specify "the active rider".

Example: play -t Roger -r 7 -s 9

plot

Draws the map to a png file. (You can give the course as a command line parameter, in which case the file will be called "naimless.png".) Also draws weather and rider positions if they're defined.

• -s N - make the standard unit size N pixels. Default 24. A single space on a straight track section is 1 unit wide and 2 units long.

If there's a "!colours.yaml" in the current directory, its terrain entries will be used instead of the master colours.yaml. Probably I'll move this into the game configuration file eventually.

Once you've got the image file, you'll need to upload it to wherever the forum expects to find images.

setuprace

Gets a race ready to start:

• allocates weather
• primes mountain point lists
• builds each rider's deck

show-energy

Displays each team's hands, wrapped in (details) blocks so that players don't see them accidentally.

show-score

Displays current scores in each category, as well as tour point totals.

• -f calculate TP bonuses for combativity, mountain points and time

status

Shows who's played and who hasn't. '.' is an unplayed rider; '/' has finished (or otherwise has no location); 'a' can be played automatically (hand holds only 2s and Xs).

Overview

Here's how to use the software to run a Flamme Rouge tour.

• Make a directory for the software, for example ~/flamme-rouge. Put everything in there, svg files under icons/.
• Each tour will be a subdirectory off that, so create it and chdir to it.
• Get your players.
• For each player: addteam
• If running on BGG, add "style: bgg" to the YAML file.
• For each race:
  • Edit the latest YAML to include a course entry; pick one of the courses from courses.yaml or design your own.
  • setuprace which will show the setup order
  • plot will show the empty course
  • For each player: place their riders, plot as needed
  • Run the breakaway:
    • energy followed by show-energy
    • For each player, play their first breakaway card
    • breakaway shows the current status. When all have played it'll show the results
    • energy -b, show-energy to get second breakaway hands
    • play as before
    • breakaway will again show current status, then when you have all the card plays in it'll do the move and set things up for the first turn of the race
  • For each turn of the race:
    • plot then put the image where players can see it
    • energy followed by show-energy
    • For each player, play their cards; status shows who's not played yet
    • mover does the actual moving, and shows a log of what happened
    • That finishes with the number of riders still in the race. If there are any left, run another turn.
  • At the end of the race:
    • endrace does the bookkeeping and shows exhaustion recovery
    • show-score shows the full score to date

Player briefing

Players need to know these things in addition to the rules of the game, as well as the contents of The Grand Tour section below.

• As well as rouleur and sprinteur, you can choose from the all-rounder puncheur (2,3,5,6,8 three times each for 72 energy) and the hill-climber grimpeur (2..4,6,7 three times each for 66 energy, but their uphill speed limit is 7 rather than everyone else's 5).

• Uphill, downhill, supply and cobbled areas are shown as solid areas of red, dark blue, pale blue and brown respectively.

• If all the spaces at the start or end of one of those areas are full, an appropriate sign will appear on the right side of the track to show just where the special area starts or ends.

• Weather (rain, headwind, tailwind, crosswind) is shown with square black icons. If riders are on or near the tile where it applies, the icon is centred on the leading left corner of the tile, with a black bar showing how far the effect extends. Otherwise it's shown translucent in the centre of the file.

• To make life easier, each turn you'll see a message containing both your riders' hands. It's up to your sense of fair play to look at just one of these hands, choose the card you're going to play, and only then look at the other one. (And indeed not to look at other players' hands.)

• A special case of this is the first step of the breakaway, where you need to choose which of your riders will be making the break, then submit one of their cards. (For the second step, you'll only see that rider's hand.)

The Grand Tour

This section is just for reference so that you know what's going on. Everything here is handled automatically.

For each race, the first, second and third place finishers get 3, 2 and 1 tour points respectively. At the end of each race, riders retain half their exhaustion (round up) in their deck for the next race.

Placement order after the first race is the reverse of those placing points (lowest points places first). Ties are broken in favour of the team that has the rider with the highest time (see below), then randomly.

The first rider to leave each contiguous uphill section gets a number of mountain points (the longer the uphill, the more points are available). This is done by track order at the end of the turn on which they crossed the line. Highest mountain point totals at the end of the tour get 3, 2 and 1 tour points respectively. (Note that the "U" uphill finish does not allow a rider to leave the uphill, so no mountain points are scored for it.)

length	category	points
1-2	Cat. 4	1
3-5	Cat. 3	2, 1
6-8	Cat. 2	3, 2, 1
9-10	Cat. 1	4, 3, 2, 1
11+	Hors catégorie	6, 4, 3, 2, 1

A rider who is in the lead (or joint lead) after movement gets a combativity point. Highest combativity point totals at the end of the tour get 3, 2 and 1 tour points respectively.

Each turn of riding adds a minute to the rider's time – except the turn in which they finish, which instead subtracts 10 seconds per space past the finish line. (The first two riders to finish get a further 10-second subtraction.) Lowest time totals at the end of the tour get 3, 2 and 1 tour points respectively.

Ties are broken generously: if two riders share equal top combativity, both get the 3-point award, and the rider in next place gets the 2-point award.

Total tour points determine the individual winner; tour points totalled for all riders for a single time determine the team winner. Individual category winners may also be celebrated.

For the Future

• bot teams

Credits and Licence

Flamme Rouge game by Asger Harding Granerud

Grimpeur original design unknown; Puncheur and this version of Grimpeur by Vincent Joly. https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1697244/new-types-riders-brainstorming https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1987853/new-rider-grimpeur

Weather icons are originally from game-icons.net: specifically "Windy Stripes", "Poker Hand" and "Raining", all by Lorc and used under CC-BY-3.0. Modifications to "Windy Stripes" and "Poker Hand" by Roger Bell_West are under CC-BY-SA-3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Traffic sign icons (climb, descent, cobbles, "end") are taken from the UK government document "Know Your Traffic Signs", this being public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The Supply Zone icon is a public-domain image modified and superimposed onto a UK road sign template from the same document. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/2/

All code by Roger Bell_West, released under the GNU General Public Licence (version 3, or any later version at your discretion). http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html