Pyramid Review
Notre Dame
Published by Rio Grande Games
Designed by Stefan Feld
Full-color boxed set with five game board District sections; three Notre Dame Tiles (triangle, square, pentagon); five rat markers (black wooden cubes); 15 person cards (nine ABC cards, six generically-backed cards); one bell ringer (first player marker); 25 gold coins; 84 prestige tokens (denominations 1, 3, 5, 10); eight-page rulebook & separate double-sided supplement page; 45 action cards; 70 influence markers (wooden cubes); five trusted friend pawns; five wooden carriages; 20 message tokens; $44.95
Notre Dame is a game of politics in which each player takes control of a powerful family in Paris, and thus is in charge of a district of the city. Comparable to classics such as Puerto Rico, the balance of expanding influence, traveling messengers, and donations to the church is a race to gain influence while hordes of rats try to lower everyone's property values. The game lasts nine turns, although much can be done in these turns. The goal of Notre Dame is to gather more victory points (VP, or "prestige") than everyone else while trying to avoid overruns of the plague. As an intermediate goal, players seek to deploy all of their Influence Cubes to the board to reap the most benefits.
The physical components are of a decent size, the board components are made of a strong cardboard, the standard Eurogame cubes are distinguishable from the board components, and the cards are themselves distinct. The box's . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: October 3, 2008
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