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Welcome to the French Quarter, the heart of New Orleans! You're in town for a weekend trip with plans to spend your Saturday evening taking in as many of the city's unique sights and sounds as possible in a mere eight hours.
Whether it's the distinct food, local culture, shopping hotspots, mystic customs, or the vibrant nightlife, there's something to experience on practically every corner. There's live jazz everywhere you go, and NOLA is world-famous for its street performers. Make sure you don't miss the spontaneous wedding parades, known locally as "second lines", that roll through the streets!
Play it safe or go wild — it's your choice. As you navigate the city, your map will serve as both a guidebook and a memento of your trip. Reunite with your friends at the end of the night to compare notes and swap stories.
In French Quarter, you choose dice from the card row to take actions and travel via different methods of transportation with varying distances: walking, carriage ride, taxi, streetcar, riverboat, or just hanging out to socialize.
As you travel around the city, you get to visit buildings and see performers where you stop. All these activities slowly fill up tracks that chart your experiences with food, culture, shopping, mysticism, and partying. You have to make tough choices between in-game bonuses and score multipliers! After eight hours of gallivanting about town, players compare their end results to see who had the most memorable night in NOLA.
-description from designer
- Strong New Orleans flavor and theme
- Clear, teaching-oriented presentation
- Layered action choices with meaningful decisions
- Solo mode and expansions announced
- Rule density may be daunting for new players
- Complex scoring surfaces could overwhelm newcomers
- Pace depends on player cooperation and dice luck
- tourism and city-building through dice-driven actions
- New Orleans, present-day, eight-hour stay exploring food, culture, mysticism, and nightlife
- instructional/tutorial with thematic flavor
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Card-driven action resolution — Resolve icons on chosen cards in left-to-right order to perform activities.
- Compound Scoring — Score across multiple activity tracks with bonuses from icons and circles.
- dice placement — Roll a set of dice and place them on color-coded cards to activate actions.
- Dice pool and color-die placement — Roll a set of dice and place them on color-coded cards to activate actions.
- End-game scoring and Courtyards, visits — Score from courtyards, multiple visits, and performer tracks at game end.
- Movement and map actions — Move tourists across a map using transportation methods with adjacency rules.
- Multi-track scoring and bonuses — Score across multiple activity tracks with bonuses from icons and circles.
- Second line track — Advance a second line on the map to unlock more points and track bonuses.
- Track advancement — Advance a second line on the map to unlock more points and track bonuses.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- French Quarter you're visiting New Orleans on a fine Saturday and you're trying to make the most out of the eight hours that you are there
- French Quarter is played over eight rounds each consisting of four phases
- you'll keep playing taking actions traveling and exploring all that New Orleans has to offer until all eight rounds have been completed
- This project is also coming to Kickstarter so make sure to hit that link to learn more about this game
- let's jump on over to the table and show you how to play the game
References (from this video)
- Interesting theme
- Complex mechanisms
- Difficult to read map
- Small print
- Challenging navigation
- Tourist vacation experience
- New Orleans
- City exploration
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Movement — Moving tourist piece around city map
- Roll and Write — Rolling dice to take actions and mark progress
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- We're trying to play through as many of the games that we have in our collection from 2024 as possible
- Losing in this game is not always bad
References (from this video)
- Strong New Orleans flavor
- solo play option mentioned in discussion
- family-friendly appeal
- New Orleans culture and Cajun vibes
- New Orleans, Louisiana
- rolling-right style with solo play mentioned
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- roll-and-write — Dice are rolled and results are recorded or applied to scoring areas
- theme-driven route/score capture — Player actions align with a New Orleans-flavored scoring track
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- French Quarter is sweet roll flip and right.
- the alphabet is now in flux.
- Monopoly Deal is pretty fun.
- Sherlock the game is upside down.