I warn you now that this will not be pretty. Yes, we had decided on Notre Dame, and we sat down to Notre Dame, but building a medieval city is an exercise in deprivation and pain.
Oh, and rats.
OK, so the game might not be as dark as all that, but this Stefan Feld design (and photos by Kilroy_locke) is hell in cardboard. It’s a game that doesn’t give up its secrets easily. Earlier this week, when we played Fresco, the strategies that you might want to pursue were clear, or at least were suggested by the design of the game. It was like looking under the hood of a car built before, say, 1990. After a moment’s
reflection, you can start to see where the various hoses connect, how the metal meshes, and you can get a sense for why the wires go where they do. Even Tikal, our last game, was pretty clear. You knew what you needed to do, and you knew goddam good and well that you couldn’t do it all.
Notre Dame? I’ll just mention this strange detail: the game comes with a hairshirt for each player.
Sorry. That’s not true. But the rules suggest that you should power-sand the first two layers of your skin off and then sprinkle each other with vinegar.
OK, that’s not true, either, but it is true that this is not a game for the faint of heart. I did a little reading online, and it seems that a couple of players are feeling pretty good about their strategy after 150 or 500 plays. That’s a lot of deprivation and pain. And rats.
So let me explain a bit about how the game works. The board is modular, and it changes with the number of players. You each have a district for which you are responsible. Each district has the same buildings, hidden messages, and rat tracks. You will all get nine turns broken down into a few phases (one of the joys of this hobby is figuring out what each designer and publisher means by ‘phase’ and ‘turn’). You have a personal deck of building cards from which you draw three randomly. You keep one, pass two, receive two, choose one, and then you’ll get to play two of the three you end up with. The buildings give you things (points, money, resources, rat extermination, a chance to pick up messages) and you hope for the best. When you’re done with the buildings, you get a chance to bribe a local official or personality who also gives you advantages. The player with the most prestige points at the end wins.
Oh, it should be that simple. This game is stingy in the way that salt is stingy to slugs. In a game like Airships, there are economic engines that you can count on. If you have this card, you will always get this resource. An engine like that has a certain inevitability, true, but a kind of elegance as well. But you must remind yourself as you play Notre Dame that we’re talking about an era when life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”…if you were lucky.
I’ll be honest, I wanted to cry. After a couple of rounds, I needed something, anything. Any goddam resource beyond simply keeping the rats out of my borough (though I kept wanting to say “arondissement”). At the end, after Dana won, we had split responses. I wanted to go back to it. How could I improve? Where had I gone wrong? at the beginning or in some detail? Dana decided it was a mean game, and was glad to be shut of it. It was not comfortable, and both reactions make a ton of sense.
Where does that leave us? I’m bemused that this game is part of a series from Alea called the Big Box Series. The Tikal box was large if you consider the acreage devoted to that face, but it wasn’t deep. Notre Dame is, well, modest. About the size of an old 3M box, or maybe a bit smaller. In the States, you’d have to have a box on the scale of Horus Heresy or Axis & Allies to be considered big. Or, hell, call yourself Titan and have done with it. But I do think about the resources that go into these games, even if the print runs are as tightly constrained as my rat population along the Rue des Chats. I try to buy games second hand (remind me to rant about the shipping practices of people who are not me) and not just for price. I’m trying to be a bit more discriminating as a consumer, and that ambition got easier as my literacy improved. I might suggest that an electronic format like the iPad or Surface might ease our drain on resources, but I’m leery of that claim; building those objects is hideously intensive. And the game experience is vastly different. I have yet to score well on the iPad version of Carcassonne, but the tabletop version is quite comfortable. Smaller boxes? Cheapass? Multi-use systems like PiecePack and Treehouse offer some intriguing options, though I admit that I haven’t played with either of the sets that I own. Cards are good, but the fun bits… Take a moment while I stroke the felt. Ah…
So there’s a lot in that last paragraph. Resources. The future and electronics. The social aspect of gaming. The tactile pleasure of manipulating the environment. So these are all issues to get back to. But Wendy will probably be chirping in a very few hours, and I need to go prepare for that.
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