Sagrada Review

This is an excellent board game - well designed, fantastic repeat play, and a great theme for those that love Barcelona, stained glass, and landmarks by Gaudi including the Sagrada Familia basilica. In this dynamic dice drafting game, complete your own stained glass window with brightly colored dice (red, green, blue, yellow, purple), and compete with your fellow artisans for... you guessed it.. the most VICTORY POINTS!

This is such a great game for families or small groups, and I feel REALLY bad that it's taken me THIS LONG to play Sagrada because it's a really great game. Sagrada can play 1-4 players, and so far it's been great with 2 or 3 players, and I'm sure that remains true at both 1 and 4 players.

Each player has their own stained glass window (with a grid that changes each time you play) to construct and fill with dice. All players also share 3 Tool Cards and 3 Public Objective cards which sit in the middle of the play space. In addition, everyone receives their own Private Objective card - this is one of the 5 colored dice and the face value of each of that color dice in your grid is counted as points at the end of the game. Finally, you are given Favor Tokens depending on the level of difficulty of your grid which can vary from 3 to 6 (higher being harder).

Ok so ready to get started? There are 90 dice (18 of each color) that are placed in a black bag and 10 rounds in each game. One player draws dice from the bag each round. With a 3 player game, 7 dice are chosen at a time (with 2 players, 5 dice, and with 4 players, 9 dice). Every player drafts 2 dice per round. After the dice are drawn, a player selects a die (players draft dice in a certain order - see the full rules here), and places it in their window.

Players must follow certain rules when placing their dice. These are 1) Dice must be placed adjacent to other dice either diagonally or orthogonally 2) When dice are placed diagonally they can be the same color or value of the dice they are "touching" 3) when dice are placed orthogonally (next to or below, e.g. same row or column), they can NOT be the same color or value. On each window pattern, some of the die color and values have already been filled in, and those parameters must be followed. For example, in a box that is red, only a red die may be placed there, etc etc.  In a box with a value of "3," only a die with a value of 3 may be played there. For boxes that are white, any color or any value dice can be played. The above rules still apply.

Use Favor Tokens to access special abilities on the Tool Cards and give yourself more placement options, (such as increase or decrease the value of a die), in order to help fill your grid and remember to also keep your Private and the Public Objectives in mind. At the end of 10 rounds of play, add all of your Victory Points. These include your Private Objective, the Public Objectives, your Favor Tokens (add 1 VP for each left over), and how many spaces left on your stained glass window (lose 1 VP for each open space). As you can see, there's a lot to keep track of, which makes the game a lot of fun!

Because the stained glass pattern grid changes every game, as well as the Private Objective, Public Objective, and the Tool Cards, not to mention the dice drafting aspect, each game is different and has unique challenges and goals. This makes Sagrada a really fun and exciting game to play again and again!

For the full set of rules for Sagrada, see here.