The location: 14th century France. The objective: to develop the most valuable district of Paris. The story: irrelevant. This is a German game, after all, so it's all about the gameplay.
This is primarily a game of resource management. You have three resources: gold, cubes and rats. Cubes let you take your normal actions each turn, as long as you don't run out of them. Gold lets you take a special action at the end of each turn, as long as you don't run out of it. Rats accumulate each turn and do nothing, as long as you don't have too many... but if you collect more than 9 of them, really bad things start happening to you. Most game actions involve gaining more Gold, gaining more Cubes or reducing your Rat population. And if you concentrate entirely on managing your resources, you should have no problem keeping them all under control.
Naturally, the object of the game is to score Victory Points, and most actions that get you VP don't do jack squat for your Cubes, Gold or Rats. It's a constant balancing act of how far you can push your resources without everything breaking.
Player interaction comes in the form of a CCG-sealed-booster-like "draft" at the start of each round. You draw three cards (representing three of the nine possible actions in the game), keep one, and pass two to the left. You then receive your right-hand opponent's two passed cards, keep one, pass one to the left, and receive the discard from your right. Each turn you choose two of the three actions to take. So, you never know exactly what actions will be available, and much of the strategy comes from balancing your need to keep actions that are useful to you with your desire to not pass actions that the players to your left desperately need.
There are several more nuances to the game, but all in all it's a game where you have lots of good options at every decision point but you can't do everything, so every time you gain something you know you're also giving up something else. The level of complexity is similar to Puerto Rico, so if you like that game you'll probably enjoy Notre Dame as well.
This game does have one advantage over other games in its class. Most games of this complexity, due to their strategic depth, take about 90 minutes to play. Notre Dame takes half that, allowing it to fit in shorter play sessions.
