New Rule

Twice over the holidays while my relatives were in town, I had the chance to try out this stellar board game by Rio Grande, makers of Puerto Rico. Only just released this year, it has yet to achieve the level of respect held by its Caribbean sister, but I suspect that is only a matter of time. Fairly simple and quick by empire-builder standards, Notre Dame nevertheless delivers that most precious of design experiences, best phrased in the slogan of the immortal Othello: “A minute to learn, a lifetime to master.” While not likely to take a lifetime, Notre Dame is certainly versatile, subtle, and deliciously challenging to the strategic-minded. The description from BoardGameGeek:

Players play as well-off Parisians in the 15th century who wish to improve the importance and appearance of their city quarter around the famous Notre Dame cathedral. The primary game concept is original but simple card play which players use to permanently improve their influence in the quarter. However, turn after turn, round after round, players must make choices that can have major implications. Because if one does one thing, then the other can’t be done any more. Concentrating on one aspect means automatically ignoring another. Which, above all others, is particularly dangerous in the case of the gradually approaching plague…

After 9 exciting rounds and about 75 action-filled minutes, Notre Dame is over. The ‘maitre’ who has made the most of his cards and has garnered the most prestige points is the winner.

The most remarkable aspect of the game is the almost total lack of randomness. Nearly every board game I know carefully balances a randomness factor with player choice to keep the game interesting and slightly unpredictable through to the end. Notre Dame, in contrast, has no dice and only a very small card-shuffle presence. Players hold nine cards corresponding to the various provinces of their borough, or city quarter–seven sections, one “trusted friend” (wild) card, and one Notre Dame card. Playing a card allows you to add influence to (activate) that province for the turn, returning resources or rewards of a certain type to the player (such as gold, prestige points, more influence tokens, movement points for your carriage, defense against the plague, and so on). But the selection process for these cards is highly unusual; I am told it is similar to Puerto Rico, though I have not yet played it. From your nine cards you take the top three, select one to keep, and pass the other two to the player on your left. From the two cards passed to you from your neighbor, you select one and pass the remaining card on, again to your left. With the single card passed to you from your right-hand neighbor, you now have three cards from three different hands. During the round, you’ll get to play two of them.

This, I feel, is incredible. What subtlety! This takes the game entirely out of the realm of a simple nine-card shuffle and raises it to the level of card prediction and opponent reading seen in big-game poker. Now, reading your opponents and trying to predict which cards they’ll pass on, trying to track the contents of three hands as they pass by to inform probability calculations, trying to hoard and bury cards you know your neighbors are looking for… it’s amazing the depths to which this can go. I’m a fair hand at poker, but I play by the numbers–strict probability. That tactic helped me win the first game, but canny opponents and a few ill-timed misfortunes cost me the second. I asked my brother, after he won, how he did it. “I don’t know,” he said, “I just tried to go for X and Y, and the cards seemed to work out.” My brother is a clever tactician, a master Risk player, so that was a telling statement to make. The subtleties of the game are immediately apparent… and seductive, to the strategy fan. Even after only twice through, once as victor, I can see it taking me another dozen games to really hone a strategy that fits my play style, to say nothing of grasping all the other possible strategies and their effective counters.

Of course there is much more to the game than the boroughs and provinces. Moving your carriage to markets nets you instant bonus resources and is often overlooked by players concentrating on their borough (a situation I exploited to win my first game), there are “town figures”–a spread of three character cards drawn from several small shuffles, recycling every three rounds–whom you can hire once per turn for special protections or rewards. There’s the plague, which builds every turn and can cripple your play if you don’t work to preempt it. And of course, there’s Notre Dame–a costly and risky common province, but worth lots of prestige if you are clever and fortunate. But these are satellite mechanics that support the core–the borough cards and card-passing. It’s one of the most effectively balanced games I’ve seen, and sheer brilliance in the way its mechanics eschews the mundanity of a simple shuffle for the rich complexity of poker-style table tactics.

Tags: Game Criticism //