What is it? A puzzly dice-drafting / maybe set collection game
The Deets: 1-4 players, 20-40 minutes
Designed by: Adrian Adamescu, Daryl Andrews
Published by: Floodgate Games
It wasn’t all war and explosions and betrayal for me this year. After all, I did some dealer-hall-wandering with notorious eurogamer @UpliftAndrew, and he dragged me over to a little game called Sagrada, soon to be on kickstarter.
Sagrada uses colorful translucent dice that players draft to build stained-glass windows. As you can see in the featured image above, the player board marks certain spaces with colors or pips. Your dice have to match whatever’s printed on the card, if anything, and there are a few other restrictions on which dice can be placed next to each other and so forth. At the start of the game you’ll have a random card dealt to you with four possible boards to choose from on that card. The more difficult the board, the more skill tokens you get which you can spend on special actions.
The ultimate goal is to score the most points, of course, which depends entirely on a set of three cards dealt randomly at the start of the game. These cards give you goals, such as aligning four different colors in a single column, or getting five different numbers across a row. You’ll be able to achieve these goals multiple times on your card for each row or column that meets the requirements.
The cool component feature will be a special casing you’ll insert your player board into which will provide inset placements for your dice so they’re not just resting on the card. It’s definitely a puzzley sort of game that’ll force you to sort through arrangements in your head for the best possible placements to maximize your score. And at the end, you’ll at least have a neat arrangement of colorful dice!
Sagrada is heading to Kickstarter sometime in the near future.