Notre Dame: Conclusions

Two and a half years late, but I've finally gotten around to digging up the conclusion I wrote for my Notre Dame strategy series. Here it is!



Putting it all together...

Ok, so we know we need to kill 28 rats, pick up 10 cubes, make 8 gold... Oh yeah, and pick up as many VPs as we can. We only get 27 actions total and yet we want to pick up 46 resources. Assuming each of rats, cubes, and gold are equivalently 'hard' to do, a good strategy has to be finding a way to take actions which generate large numbers of at least one of those resources. The more we can get in one action the more actions we free up for actually winning the game! So, lets go over all the actions you can take and look at what each can provide. There are 24 different actions you can take, 9 cards and 15 bribes.

The Cards

Guesthouse - 1 resource only (lets not kid ourselves, if you play 4 guesthouses you can't win)
Car - 1 resource and between 1 and 3 VPs (or no resources and 4 VPs)
Bank - geometric resource progression (~2 resources, see below)
Cube-house - geometric resource progression (~2 resources, see below)
VP-house - geometric VP progression (though mostly just to proc parks!)
Hospital - Between 2 and 9 resources depending on when you play it
Park - 1 resource and potential VPs (~7 VPs, see below)
Balki - any of the above
Notre Dame - lose 2-4 resources for VPs (~4 VPs, see below)

Basic Townsfolk

Moneylender - 2 resources and 1 VP
Monk - 2 resources and 1 VP
Doctor - 2-8 resources
Wench - 1 resource and 3 VPs
Jester - Best action of above
Minstrel - 3-6 resources or 3-6 VPs or 18+ resources or 21+ VPs (see below)

Phase A Townsfolk

Night Watchman - 3-6 VPs
Bishop - 1 resource + best unused card
City Guard - 2-7 VPs

Phase B Townsfolk

Rat King - 0-9 VPs
Lawyer - 0+ VPs (Most often 0 or 3)
Guild Master - 2-12 VPs

Phase C Townsfolk

Queen - 4+ VPs
Carpenter - 3-7 VPs
Mayor - 3-15 VPs


So, what does it all mean? By and large, very few actions actually generate multiple resources. The only ones that really do all kill rats, so while you need to take a couple of them you can't focus on just those as your big resource actions. Minstrel is the clear winner in terms of both resources or VPs, but he's tricky to use. He can bring in the most gold, but doing so strands a lot of cubes in the bank. In order to use him fully you need to have 3 cubes in one square already. Moving 2 into the bank is pretty mediocre, it's like a very bad money lender and still requires a plan to get them out again. (A second jester or maybe just leave them in for +3VPs on phase C guyo.) Minstreling two into the hospital or park actually seems really good early game now that I look at it. The only downside to moving two out early is you won't have three stockpiled to move out from that square for a better jester later.

One thing really worth pointing out is winning scores are often in the 70-80 range. Ignoring park related actions the best you're looking at realistically is scoring 9 from a single action, and there are preciously few chances to score even 9. What this means is over the course of the game if you're going to win you're going to be scoring small numbers of VPs frequently. Scoring points frequently is what really makes the park shine, so I'm pretty sure a winning strategy has to involve the park.

Remember how we wanted 46 resources out of 27 actions? Most of the big point plays don't generate any resources at all, so you need your resource plays to make as many resources as possible while trying to maximize the jester. As such it seems like a very strong plan is to try to get 3 cubes into the bank or the cube house early. Get in, get your 6 of a resource, and then throw them into the park or the hospital. (Park if you won't get plagued by doing it, hospital if you will otherwise get plagued.) If possible, repeat again for the other one. Use your early bribes to generate the cubes and cash you need to get this plan going. (Bribing the night watchman for 6VPs on turn 1 seems good, but I'd rather take moneylender, wench, or monk over it.) Playing into the park is worth a resource and is the highest VP card play you can make. I've been passing these early to set up a tripleton and I'm no longer sure that's correct.

Notre Dame is bad. It costs you two resources (you lose the gold and a cube) and it only returns 4 VPs in the worst case. Being the only one into ND might be worth it, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to try to skip it from now on. Later game NDs get better because it's one action to proc the park twice.


Geometric Resource Progression - What does this game mechanic actually do? Assuming you don't Jester into a production building you earn 1, then 2, then 3, then 4, then 5 resources. Note, 15 cubes is more than you could possibly want. 15 gold is enough to play a full ND every phase on its own with no other gold pickups. So, the 5th guy will rarely if ever be played in either building. While you get a ton for him, it's a mostly wasted ton. Anyway, how much is an action worth on average? It depends how often you go. If you go once, it's worth 1 resource. 2 is worth 1.5. 3 is worth 2. 4 is worth 2.5. 5 is worth 3. So you're likely getting 2 resources per action from the bank and cube-house, maybe 2.5 per.

Park - How much is it actually worth? As an upper bound, assume each guy in the park is worth .5 VPs per VP generating action. Notre Dame counts as two VP generating actions for this analysis. Each phase you can take at most 3 bribes worth VPs (and likely will) likely one ND, and maybe 1-2 cars/VP houses. So a park guy to start phase 1 is likely worth 10.5 VPs. To start phase 2 is likely worth 7 VPs, and to start phase 3 is likely worth 3.5 VPs. Likely is actually a misnomer here since it's not precise at all and quite possibly an overestimate since sometimes you won't bribe for VPs and sometimes you play parks mid-phase, but you could also end up earning more points out of it because you could just play all cars and VP-houses. Also, the first guy in the park is worthless, he doesn't make .5 VPs in reality but if you get two guys in the park they make the full 1. Overall, the park action is probably worth around 7 VPs in the early-mid game and 4 in the mid-late game. It's not worth much at the very end.

Notre Dame - How much is it actually worth? At worst, everyone plays their ND card and you end up with 2 bonus points to go with the 1 for going to ND in the first place. As well you get 2 park procs, which can be very clutch. At best you get a solo-ND for anywhere from 6-12 bonus points. Most likely you'll get 4 plus the park procs, which we're really assigning to the park and not to ND.

Minstrel - What does it do? What it does really depends on where you put the cubes. If you put them in the bank or cube-house then you're likely to only actually go there once or twice. As such, you're getting 3 or 6 resources from the action. If you put them in the hospital you kill 3 rats a turn for the rest of the game, so if there are 7 turns left (best case scenario) it's worth 21 resources. (I say that's best case because you need to have 3 cubes in one spot before you can make optimal use of it, and that'll take a couple turns.) If you put them in the park you score 1.5 points per VP action for the rest of the game on average, so using the park calculations above you're getting 21ish VPs out of doing it at the end of phase A. Moving them to the car or the guesthouse is a huge mistake. Moving them to the VP house is worth 3 VPs every time you move to the VP house which sounds good, but consider moving them to the park instead. Unless more than half of your remaining VP actions are VP houses, you're better off in the park in the abstract sense. Now, since the park works only on even numbers it's not quite as clearcut, you might only need more than a third of your actions to be VP houses to profit. Most likely, though, that still won't be the case. Especially since I'm going to hate draft your VP houses on you if you need them to win! End result... The hospital and the park both benefit from leaving cubes in and not so much from activating them, and they have monsterous payouts if you move 3 cubes into either of them, especially early. A final thing to consider with the Minstrel is how it impacts the final scoring cards, discussed next.

If everything has worked out swimmingly for you then you'll have all the resources you need by the final round and you'll be able to buy all 3 of the big point cards. So if you have 3 cubes in the bank and transfer them all to the park you lose 3 points from the Mayor. Assuming the park was your biggest spot before that you get the 3 points right back with the Queen. If you didn't have 3 in the park before then you don't lose anything making the trade. You also lose 1 point from the Carpenter by emptying the bank. Overall you likely lose 1 or 2 points by making this play but do get them right back by proccing the park for at least 1 more on all 3 of these bribes.


In conclusion, what do I advise? Well, you need to balance acquiring enough of every resource with the need to focus on specific resources in order to get enough of them in the early game. I like to get one of my gold or cubes by playing cards and the other with bribes or by driving my car. Then you can minstrel them out and into the park where they'll have the biggest impact on your VP acquisition. Notre Dame is a trap early game and just costs too much to use. Late game it's not very efficient but it's one of the few ways to proc the park so it's good if you've overloaded the park. It's also good if you've got a ton of money because you can cash in for many bonus points on the play.