There are already quite a few reviews for Notre Dame, but I found my assessment of the game is different than that of the median reviewer. I hope my review will help some of you decide if this game is for you or your group.

Looks & Contents

The quality of the components is quite high: a nice and originally designed board, some wooden pieces, a bunch of cardboard tiles, some decent quality cards. Nice art.

Rules & Gameplay

The rule book is well-written, no glaring shortcomings that I’m aware of. The different characters to bribe take some getting used to, expect to keep the rules at hand the first couple games. Afterwards, an occasional double-check may be necessary.

The rules are quite elegant and make for fast and fluent play. Downtime is low, which definitely is a plus. Brain burn or analysis paralysis is very unlikely as there are limited options at any given time. This may be considered a good thing, but I actually find this to be the biggest let-down of Notre Dame (more on this under ‘strategy & tactics’).
Luck plays a medium-important role; I find this usually does not determine, though it does influence, the outcome.

Player interaction is extremely limited. Everyone puts his cubes on his or her own part of town, and there is no way to actively affect another player in a way that really matters. Some people may be put off by this; I personally don’t think this is a big minus in this game as the downtime is so low. Also, you pass around action cards so it feels like you’re interacting even if you can’t really affect your fellow players.

Strategy & Tactics

These are heavily restricted by the action card drafting mechanic and the random nature of the available characters to bribe. This is my major gripe with the game. If you don’t like ‘thinky’ games and prefer to have a manageable set of options at any one time, skip this part and zoom right over to ‘In Conclusion’.

Strategy is actually non-existant (in my definition of strategy), since you cannot tell at what point of the game you will have access to which action cards or characters to bribe. This is more of a ‘go with the flow’ game, which is actually not really a problem at all.

The problem in my perception is that tactics are also heavily restricted by this.

There are at most three action cards to choose from at any one time. The cards after the first are leftovers from your neighbor, so the most important choice is the first one. Once the action cards are chosen, carrying out the associated actions takes a minimal thinking effort. The order in which the two actions are played is usually irrelevant.

There’s the ‘rat track’ to keep an eye on, but there are so many ways to manage this that in my experience it’s fairly easy to stay pestilence free. This is quite important as the penalty for an outbreak is quite heavy, and will recur every turn if you don’t do anything about it.

It’s always best to have at least one gold available for donation to Notre Dame, and to have one spare gold each turn to bribe a character (though sometimes this doesn’t work out). There are some interesting tactics here, especially with the effects that add or move around influence cubes. Still, it’s usually relatively clear what the best move is at any one time.

In Conclusion

Will you like Notre Dame? This depends on what you’re expecting from a game.

If you’re looking for a game that’s light, fast, fun, reasonably involved yet still easy enough to explain to non-gamers, go out now and buy Notre Dame.

If you’re looking for a game that supplies a worthy intellectual challenge and pits your tactical and strategical mettle against your cunning opponents, Notre Dame is probably not for you.

As I’m mostly interested in games of the second category, my score for Notre Dame is 7,5. This roughly translates to ‘good game that will see play from time to time’.