Hello and welcome to ‘Focused on Feld’. In this series of reviews, I am working my way through Stefan Feld’s entire catalogue. Over the years, I have hunted down and collected every title he has ever put out. Needless to say, I’m a fan of his work. I’m such a fan, in fact, that when I noticed there were no active Stefan Feld fan groups on Facebook, I created one of my own.

Today we’re going to talk about 2007’s Notre Dame, his third game. Following the release of Rum & Pirates the year before, this was Stefan Feld’s second game to appear in Alea’s big box series. Even though the game was released in the same year as In the Year of the Dragon, I’m calling this his third game because, numerically, Notre Dame comes before In the Year of the Dragon in the series (numbers 11 and 12, respectively).

In Notre Dame, players take on the roles of noble families in the city of Paris at the end of the 14th century as they vie to become the most prestigious family in the city. Each player begins the game with their own borough, a board which is divided into seven different sectors, and is connected to a central tile which represents the Notre Dame…

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There was a moment late in my first game of the medium-weight strategy game Orloj: The Prague Astronomical Clock where I pretty much landed on my final thoughts about the game.

I had just taken a turn that felt pretty dope. That turn began when I took the Construction action, and spent four resources to construct the second-to-last piece of the month dial on the big clock at the center of the board. That netted me eight points, for the gold, two wood, and paint I had spent to build it. Then I placed one of my workers on the clock, and thanks to adjacency rules, scored four more points. Then I got a bonus based on the position of that completed space on an outer wheel that surrounds the clock, a track that lists bonuses on what is known as the Painter track.

That bonus gave me a free apostle. These apostle tiles are earned and placed in one of two storage slots on each player’s personal board. As a free action, I took that new apostle and placed it in a column on my personal, 12-space apostle board. It was the third apostle in one of the columns, which earned me another bonus: an Assistant tile, which went into the newly vacated storage space where that apostle…

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