Players: 1-4 (5-6 with expansion)
Play Time: 30-45 minutes
Designer: Adrian Adamescu, Daryl Andrews
Publisher: Floodgate Games
Year: 2017
Overview
Sagrada uses brightly colored dice to fill a grid. The game concept was inspired by the stained glass windows of the famous church in Spain. There is a drafting mechanism (picking dice) and there are placement rules (details below) and both hidden and public goals. In this review I’m going to talk about both the base game and the expansion, since we have played with both. The expansion adds support for a fifth and/or sixth player, in addition to providing additional cards, dice, and a dice tray that they might as well have left out. I had previously written up my first impression of Sagrada; this review will provide more details about the components, the rules, and the game play experience.
Components
The main components are the dice, a draw bag, the cards and player boards. The dice are, well, dice. They’re pretty colors as they would need to be to simulate stained glass, but in the end they’re just dice, nothing special. The stock used for the cards is fine. Given that these cards are not shuffled that much I did not bother using sleeves. They’re not upgraded with a nice linen finish, which some games use. The art work on the cards is nicely done, and there are additional notations included to support solo play, which is appreciated.
The player boards on the other hand are fantastic. They are dual-layer boards which means when you put a die in a spot it’s much more likely to stay there. That’s an important consideration given that you’re building out a 4×5 grid of relatively small dice. It would be super easy to jostle existing dice out of position while attempting to place a new one without this! I believe this also helps to carry the theme of stained glass windows.
The expansion adds two more player boards which fit perfectly in the main game box. It’s almost as if they knew they were coming and prepared for them. 🙂 There are more dice, a rather dinky dice tray that we never use, but most importantly new public and private goal cards. In the main game, there are only six private goals, and they each have to do with a specific color die. If you watch the other players, it’s not too hard to figure out which color they are trying to horde. With the expansion that issue goes away as some private goals are more about die placement than color. That was the most welcome improvement in the game for us, as we rarely get up to 5-6 players anyway.
Overall the black fabric bag, the brightly colored dice, the dual-layer player boards, the artwork on the cards…I feel that Sagrada definitely scores higher than average on the component grading scale.