Buy Notre DameNotre Dame Product Description:
- For 2-5 players
- Historical theme
- Tons of replay value
Product Description
The players take on the roles of the heads of influential families in Paris at the end of the 14th century. In the shadow of the Notre Dame cathedral, the players compete for prosperity and reputation. Each family controls one of the 3 -5 boroughs that surround the site of Notre Dame. As head of his family, each player tries, through clever use of his action cards, to advance the power and prestige of his family, but penalties are assessed those who do not take care of the health of the people who live in their borough. The player with the most prestige at the end is the winner.
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
By Reverie
Although this one probably looks really complicated from the box, the number of pieces, and frankly the instructions... it's actually very intuitive.The flow of the game is pretty simple. It's split up in to 9 rounds. Each round you can do two actions and then hire a helper. There are three major resources in the game: - Influence markers. These are the core of the game. Each player has a limited number, and you need them to gain the benefits of various buildings. - Gold. This is used to hire helpers, and also can be donated to Notre Dame to gain Prestige. - Prestige. This is basically points, you need to have the most at the end of 9 rounds to win.There is also a Plague aspect where each round, your plague level goes up. You can control it by having influence at hospitals, but the punishment for maxing out plague is low, so it's usually not worth paying that much attention to.There are some interesting aspects to the game. There are very few cards. You are in fact guaranteed to see every card every 3 rounds (after 3 rounds, you reshuffle, and that's repeated three times), so even though there is some randomness, you have a high degree of control over what you are able to do.The game plays really fast, and like I said, it's really easy to learn. There are picture descriptions of what everything does, and the game has a really excellent manual with quick-reference material as needed.It also plays great with 2-players, so if you don't have a full group, this is a great bet. This is one of my favorite 2-player strategy board games.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
By Atma Weapon
Product Description:Notre Dame comes in the box pictured. Inside the box are included an attractive 8 page set of instructions and one reference insert (all printed in color on glossy letter-sized paper), 5 game board sections (more on this below), 3 Notre Dame tiles, 45 action cards, 15 person cards, 70 influence markers, 5 black markers, 5 trusted friends, 5 carriages, 1 bell-ringer, 20 messages, 25 gold coins, and 84 prestige tokens. There is also a black plastic item and card organizer that occupies the box. This organizer has two obvious compartments for cards and five other compartments (one in each corner as well as one large compartment in the center). I'm not really sure how exactly the organizer is intended to be used, though, and the plastic it is made out of is very thin and non-durable. My organizer had two cracks in the corners upon arrival (probably not too important). In terms of the game boards, each player gets one and you assemble them into the overall game board depending on how many players you have (and the Notre Dame tiles always go in the middle). The boards are irregular octagons made from cardboard with attractive designs and a nice glossy finish (the boards are a large part of what attracted me to the game in the first place). The cards are about the same size as regular playing cards and have attractive illustrations, and are probably a bit less durable than regular playing cards (they feel more cardboard-like and less plastic but I don't really know and it's not extremely noticeable). The influence markers and rat markers are small (maybe 1/4" cubed), colored wooden cubes. The trusted friends and carriages are made of the same wooden material but are in more complex shapes. The gold coins (circular), messages (regular octagons), and prestige tokens (regular hexagons) are all cardboard (and you actually have to punch them out of the same cardboard that you punch the game boards out from).Game Mechanics:The object of the game is to compete to collect the most prestige points by the end of nine rounds. The nine rounds are divided into three phases, and each phase is divided into three rounds. In each round three person cards are chosen semi-randomly (two from the brown person cards and one from the grey person cards). All players shuffle their color-coded action cards and draw three cards. Then, each player must choose which two of the three cards to pass to the player to the left. Then, each player must choose one of the two cards passed from the player on their right and once again pass that along to the player on the left. Then, play commences and it goes around twice giving each player an opportunity to play two of his or her three action cards. The action cards are always played on your part of the game board (which is divided up into sections). The strategy revolves around deciding which sections to play in (the different sections all provide different advantages). Finally, if a player has any gold at the end of the round, he or she may use it to hire one of the people shown on the person cards (each one has a different effect). So, that's the basic structure. If you want to know all of the details on the effects of the different sections and person cards, then you need to read the instructions, but I will describe it a little bit more so that you can get a feel for how the theme relates to the mechanics (which is part of the game's charm). OK, so, in addition to playing a card on a section, you must use an influence cube from your immediate supply (you have an ultimate supply too and playing in one of the sections allows you to move cubes from that supply into the immediate supply). There is also the rat marker in each area that moves up along a path each round based on the number of rats shown on the bottom of all three person cards (so it's effectively random). If the rat moves all the way up the path, you get "plagued" and lose prestige points as well as a supply cube (there are several sections you can play in that allow you to counter the rat's progress). There is also a carriage section that let's you move around the board (even to other players' areas) to collect messages (tokens that are worth prestige points and other miscellaneous effects). Finally, there is the bank and Notre Dame. The bank section lets you collect gold, which is primarily useful for hiring people at the end of each round. However, if you have a surplus of gold (and have the Notre Dame action card) you can use it to place influence cubes into Notre Dame (in the center of the board). This instantly gives you a certain number of prestige points depending on how much gold you spend. Then, at the end of three rounds (i.e. the end of each phase), you collect an amount of prestige points from Notre Dame based on how many influence cubes you have there relative to how many influence cubes other people have there.Summary:I think this game is really fun and has a ton of strategic angles to it from managing supply bricks, gold, rats, and your carriage if you choose to use it, to deciding what cards to pass and what people to hire. It always feels like you're starved of some resource or another and it's so hard deciding which cards to pass when you have three that all look so useful that it kills you to give them up. The game naturally tempts you to play extreme strategies due to the nature of certain multipliers but at the same time it throws enough wrenches at you that you might get screwed if you neglect a certain dimension of the game (e.g. the rat). It is a complex game to learn and may take two or three full games before you understand it, but it is a short game for 2 to 5 players, taking anywhere from 45 minutes to 75 minutes, and the complexity and chaos keep it interesting and fun. The artistic and thematic elements also add to the overall experience and make it more accessible. It's just a really cool game.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
By Godly Gadfly
Notre Dame is and remains an outstanding euro, and several years after graduating off the production line as part of the class of 2007, has to be considered one of the highest achievers of the light-medium games from that year, by typifying some of the best that the genre can offer. It doesn't quite have the depth of classics like Puerto Rico or Caylus, but compensates for this by being more accessible, and serves well as a somewhat lighter and quicker game that is both intuitive and elegant. Yet it's not to be underestimated or considered as a game of luck - far from it, because Notre Dame offers tense and interesting decisions that require you to manage risk and manipulate a very tight economy, and carefully construct long range plans for your point-scoring objectives. There's just the right balance between tactical choices and strategic options, and the card drafting keeps the game interactive without being overly confrontational, while the finite number of possibilities keep the game from bogging down with analysis paralysis.It's not too heavy, and yet there's also not a sense that so much strategic fat has been trimmed from the design that the end result is muddied by excessive randomness or that game-play becomes a mere shuffling of cardboard and wood with no real flavour, as is the case with some euros we've seen over the years. In many respects I suppose it is an exercise in efficiency, as many euros are, but the random draw of the cards forces you to plan different paths each game, the draft mechanic adds elements of fun and indirect interaction, and the risk management associated with the rats adds tension, all of which prevent it from being categorized with the mundane or blase. In the final analysis, this is no ordinary cube-pushing euro, and while it doesn't pretend to compete with the heavier games in the genre and won't please everyone's tastes, it remains one of the more shining examples of how good a lighter and medium weight euro really can be.There are those who have developed a strategic `system' in how they play the game, much of which revolves around maximizing the grey person cards. The good news is that a small expansion of nine additional grey person cards gives the game a complete makeover, without changing the core mechanics or feel. For any serious fan of Notre Dame, these new grey person cards are an absolute must have, and I highly, highly recommend them. Notre Dame has always performed strongly in our house, and the replay value and freshness offered by these expansion cards only makes it better. It's amazing what swapping in and mixing nine different cards can do! Notre Dame - highly recommended for fans of euro games. - EndersGame @ BGG
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