Laissez les bon temps rouler as you wander through the French Quarter in lively New Orleans! As you stroll down Bourbon Street, so many options open up before you. Will you take a ghost tour, immersing yourself in the storied history of the city? Enjoy the food culture, from etouffee to beignets? Live it up, taking in live performers and enjoying the nightlife? The choice is yours, with a fleet of taxis, street cars, carriages, riverboats, and walking paths at your disposal. The roll and write French Quarter by Motor City Gameworks lets you explore NOLA as never before, charting your own path across the city to pack as much into a day trip as you can. The player who makes the most of their time will claim victory. So how do you plan on taking the city by storm?
Gameplay Overview:
French Quarter is a strategic roll and write for 1-4 players. Each player gets two score sheets, one with a map of the area and one for tracking bonus points. You can earn points by visiting different buildings on your map of the historic French Quarter, with each building offering a different set of bonuses. These bonuses can generate more victory points, tracked on the second score sheet, and players can lead parades across their maps for further scoring opportunities. At the end of the eighth round, the highest scorer wins.
Each round has two parts, the Travel Phase and the Second Line Phase. There are six slim decks of cards, each featuring a different mode of travel to help you get across your map sheet. Each deck has corresponding dice that players draft along with a card in the Travel Phase, with more dice with higher player counts. You move a pawn on your map as indicated by the card you selected and enter the number on the dice face into the score box next to that building. Only certain numbers can be adjacent to each other on the map, increasing the difficulty of choosing where to travel as the rounds proceed.
Each card and most locations also have bonus scoring symbols, indicating that you partied, saw street performers, participated in local mysticism tours, ate good food, or did a cultural activity. These are recorded on separate tracks on your score sheet. Some tracks multiply the bonus of an activity the more times you do them, some give you extra movements or actions the further you move down the track, and some activities have negative effects if you participate in them too many times.
If one of the players selects the Socialize travel card and die (which I considered to be a kind of sloshing wine walk done down the city streets) the Second Line Phase occurs. The player chooses a direction on the maps for a parade through the city to advance, earning extra victory points if it moves past buildings that they have already visited. The whole parade is scored every time the Second Line Phase is activated, providing a valuable strategic method of accruing victory points.
After the eighth round, building scores, bonus points, and multipliers are added up, and the highest scoring player reigns supreme.
Game Experience:
French Quarter is about as much fun as I’ve ever had playing a roll and write game. There are so many different paths to victory that it rewards multiple play styles. You could focus on drafting the highest scoring dice and strategizing several turns out which order to visit buildings in to maximize your point potential. Or you could choose to draft based on the bonus potential instead of the building score, maxing out the score tracks that will get you the best multipliers. My partner won a game by triggering the second line as much as possible, knowing that my parade was not as strong of a scorer as theirs was.
The game is delightful in its visual design, as well. The art has a distinct illustrative style that decorates the score sheets without distracting from all the information packed onto them. The pictographs are easy to differentiate and broadcast what they represent well. I’ve heard others complain about the contrast of the text on the score sheets, which they’ve found difficult to read. We didn’t face that issue, but I know there are updated high-contrast score sheets available to download from the designers.
While the street names on the map match up with the real French Quarter, the buildings themselves are largely puns based on the actual locations. Meyer the Hatter becomes The Mad Hatter in the game, Royal Praline Company becomes Crown Praline Co, and Three Sister’s Courtyard is a sweet nod to the creator’s previous smash hit game. There’s plenty of content that feels true enough to the source location to make the game a fun souvenir or way to reminisce about a past New Orleans visit, without having to actually be familiar with the city to succeed in the game.
With two players it’s reasonable to keep tabs on your opponent’s score, but with so many different ways to get points, it gets trickier to gauge where you are as the player increases. There’s a lot to keep track of, and it’s easy to realize that you’ve missed something on one of your score sheets if you’re focusing too much on the other. The turn structure is fairly simple, which keeps the game moving quickly regardless of player count.
Final Thoughts:
French Quarter is a streamlined game that provides plenty of opportunities for challenging strategy. A lot of thought is packaged into its fairly small box. It captures the frenetic spirit of being a NOLA tourist well and does justice to the beauty of its source material. A company known for the strength of its roll and write offerings hits it out of the park once again.
Final Score: 4.5 Stars: A simple-to-learn but tricky-to-strategize product that shows off the roll and write genre in its best light.
Hits:
• Theme is on point and beautifully executed
• Simple turn structure that still provides lots of opportunities for strategy
• Lovely package and art that is compact and giftable
Misses:
• Some players have expressed concern about readability on the original score sheets
• Complicated scoring that makes it difficult to gauge your opponents throughout the game.
