Since It's Been A While...

I haven't talked about board games on my blog in a long time and I've been enamored with the one Sylvia got me for christmas so, much to Limpy's dismay...

Notre Dame: A game for 3 to 5 players which takes about an hour. There's a variant for 2 players as well. The recommended age requirement is 10 years old and I'd say that's probably in the ballpark for the youngest player that could learn how to play. I'd maybe have raised the age limit to 12 but I imagine a 10 year old could at least learn the rules if not the full strategy. Then again, I don't have kids so what the hell do I know?

In Notre Dame you're playing the role of a rich Parisian in the 15th century who is helping to beautify the area around the great cathedral. As with a lot of good Eurogames the theme is nice and is implemented well. You spend 9 rounds (broken up into 3 phases of 3 rounds each) playing cards that enable you to perform different actions. The actions can make you money, give you more pieces to put on your board, help fight the Plague, help you earn points faster, etc. The end goal is, surprise surprise, to make more points than anyone else by the end of the 9th round.

Each player has their own little board and it's placed next to a special center piece. You end up with what is more or less a circle shape made up of all the players' boards. At the beginning of the game you shuffle your Action Cards and put them in a face-down stack in front of you. Each player has 9 Action Cards and each player's Action Cards are the same as everyone else's so there's no such thing as a stack that's better or worse than anyone else's. You draw the top 3 Action Cards in your stack and look at them. You choose 1 of those cards to keep and pass the other 2 to the player to your left. The player to your right is going to hand you the 2 cards of his that he didn't want. You then look at the 2 cards he gave you and pick 1 to keep and hand the remaining one to the player to your left. Likewise, the player to your right is going to give you the card that he didn't want to keep. So you end up with 3 cards in your hand but you'll only get to use 2 of them. There aren't really any "bad" cards but some will be more useful to you at some times than others.

There are also a bunch of Person Cards which are revealed 3 at a time at the beginning of each round. At the end of the round you'll have the opportunity to hire one of those Persons to give you a special benefit. The other important thing about the Person Cards is their Plague Value. Each card has between 0 and 3 rats on it and the total number of rats on the 3 Person Cards available in a round determines how bad the Plague will be. If the effect of the Plague in your area of town is too large, bad things happen. You'll lose points & lose pieces from the board. Not nice.

Whoever is going first picks one of the 3 cards they ended up with in their hand, plays it in front of them, and performs the action that the card allows them to perform by playing one of their pieces (called Influence Cubes) onto the board in the appropriate area. As I mentioned, there are 9 different Action Cards. 8 of the 9 allow you to do something in your part of the city. You can make money by playing a piece in your Bank area, help fight the plague by playing a piece in your Hospital area, give yourself more pieces to play by playing a piece in your Cloister House area, among other things. The 9th card allows you to play a piece into the central area called (the surprises just keep coming) Notre Dame. The person to the starting player's left goes next and so on.

After everyone has taken an action, the starting player chooses one of his remaining 2 Action Cards, plays it in front of him, and takes the action that it allows him to take. Each player will only get to use 2 of the 3 Action Cards they started with so as they play the 2nd card they put the 3rd one underneath the 2nd one so no one can see what card they didn't play. Remember, you'll have one of your own Action Cards, one Action Card that the player to your right started with, and one Action Card that the player 2 seats to your right started with. And since everyone has the same 9 Action Cards in their stack it's possible that you could get your Bank card to play and someone else's Bank card to play in the same round. This can be a blessing or a curse. Having 2 of the same card could allow you to make a bunch of cash or stack up a bunch of pieces in your Hospital but it also means you have fewer options on your turn. The decisions can be painful. In a good way.

So after everyone has played a 2nd Action Card everyone gets to hire one of the Person Cards if they want to. And they usually do. The Person Cards can allow you to move your pieces around, get extra actions, eliminate the Plague on you for one round, make you some money or points, and so on.

Then the Plague takes effect. Every player has a Plague Track on their board and it goes from 0 to 9. At the end of the round you have to move the little marker on your Plague Track an amount equal to the number of rats that was on the Person Cards that were available this round. If you'd need to move your marker beyond the number 9 you lose points and a piece off the board. And nobody likes that.

And that's the end of the round. Then everybody picks up the next 3 Action Cards in their stack and you do the whole thing again. After the 3rd round you'll have used up all 9 of your Action Cards and a special scoring round occurs. This is when the Notre Dame space I talked about comes into play. Everyone who put pieces into Notre Dame during this phase (a phase is 3 rounds) gets to split up a bunch of points. The number of points divvied up depends on how many people are playing. And that ends the 1st phase. You then get all 9 of your Action Cards back, shuffle them, put them back in front of you and start phase 2. Phase 2 is 3 rounds long just like phase 1 was. When phase 2 is done you play a 3rd phase (just like the first 2) and after phase 3 you see who made the most points.

And that, in a nutshell, is how you play Notre Dame. I'm not one to go into every last detail about a game in my reviews so I'm not going to talk about all the different Action Cards and Person Cards and their specific abilities. You can click on the above link and check out the much more in depth reviews at BoardGameGeek if you want more info.

Why do I like it so much? Well, it's not overwhelming with the number of choices you have but it is filled with a lot of tense decisions. Do you keep the Notre Dame card you just picked up as one of your 3 Action Cards and get into Notre Dame early? Do you pass your Notre Dame card, keep a different Action Card, and hope someone else passes you their Notre Dame card later? You seem to always have cards to choose from that you can come up with a good idea for but you can't keep all of them. And even the ones you do keep you only get to play 2 of the 3. There's enough interaction between the players that you don't feel like you're playing multi-player solitaire but you can't do a whole lot to totally screw someone else over either. You can take your best guess as to what card will help the player to your left the least and pass that one to them but you need to balance that with making sure you keep the cards that help you the most. And the Plague is very nicely implemented. It's tough to keep the Plague below 9 but it's definitely not impossible. But in order to do that you need to allocate some actions to fight the Plague and while you're doing that you're passing up on other actions that could make you points or cash or whatever.

Notre Dame just feels very well balanced to me and you rarely feel like you're in a hopeless position. And even when you do get creamed you can look back at the game and say, "If I had done X instead..." or "If I had decided to use this card..." and come up with a plan that would've been more effective. And those are signs of a great game. There's a very high replayability as well since the order of your Action Cards is always different, as is the order of the cards that get handed to you and which Person Cards are available when. I've played it about a half dozen times and it keeps getting better. I can't wait to play again.