Mark Herman’s Fort Sumter was a lean, rangy filament of a game. After initially falling for its charms, I soon found its leanness and ranginess a little too emaciated, with not nearly enough muscle and fat beneath the skin. One of the reasons I play historical games, after all, is to see how the history is modeled, not to merely see it sketched out as the titles of locations and cards.

Enter Red Flag Over Paris. Designed by Frédéric Serval, it uses the system and leanness of Fort Sumter while still piling on, well, everything else. Its topic is the Paris Commune, the brief but fierce revolutionary outpouring that would prove so influential on Karl Marx — and become a stain on the early days of the French Third Republic.

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