These cubes will be placed onto the board based on Operations actions (removing an opposing cube or placing one of your own) or through events. The more cubes drawn from either side, the closer that player comes to breaching their last set of cubes (and losing a victory point as a result.) This, I imagine, symbolises the total chaos that Paris finds itself in – which can’t be good for whichever side caused the breach.

Both the Commune and Versailles draw influence cubes from a Crisis Track which simulates – and this takes a bit of imagination – the escalation of the crisis.

Even during setup, the way that influence cubes are placed on the board hints at this. To illustrate this, if the Versailles player has five military victory points and the Commune has four political victory points, the Versailles player wins by one point.īesides having very different objectives, the two sides play very differently. A shared scoreboard tracks both military and political victory points, and at the end of the Final Crisis, the winner will be the player who has the most victory points of the kind they need, adjusted by the points scored by their opponent. The red pieces are the Commune, and their focus is political legitimacy. In Red Flag Over Paris, the board is split into two halves – one political (containing three areas representing Politics and three for popular opinion) and one military (representing control of Paris and control of the outlying forts.)Įach game of Red Flag Over Paris lasts for just four rounds – three “normal” rounds and one “Final Crisis.” The blue player represents Versailles and will seek a military victory by holding the military locations. After all, the only thing that links the two games is the fact that both games centre on a form of area control in which the two players try to wrestle control of key parts of the conflict – whether military, social, or political – and both are driven by cards played in turn. Rather than comparing the two, I think it makes more sense to look at Red Flag Over Paris as a completely standalone game. The Paris Commune, on the other hand, is much closer to home – up step Frederic Serval’s adaptation of Mark Herman’s design, and with it, GMT Games latest offering Red Flag Over Paris.

Even though my wife and I enjoyed it (and I rated it four out of five), it was always difficult to sell the idea of Fort Sumter to other people – mainly because the American Civil War is considered less interesting to those of us on the other side of the pond. A two-player wargame simulating the onset of the American Civil War, Fort Sumter was a delight thanks to its light mechanics and deep, head-to-head gameplay. Some three and a half years ago I had the pleasure of reviewing Mark Herman’s Fort Sumter.

Red flag the ultimate game cast