by MythiccRare

Sagrada is succulent.

The boards, dice, and other components that make up Sagrada are a collective visual treat and stand as a testament to the beauty of the game’s thematic subject matter: the Sagrada Família and its iconic stained-glass windows. The game doesn’t take up a ton of space on a table, but that doesn’t stop it from grabbing a lot of attention in a room. There’s something pure, joyful, and magnetic about rolling a bunch of brightly colored dice and assembling them into intricate patterns. Sagrada’s mechanics would certainly all work without its theme, but they would be lesser for it.

As your window comes together, you might find yourself forming brief but intimate relationships with the as-yet unfilled gaps and the dice you hope will come along to fill them. The tactile experience of drafting the perfect die for the moment and socketing it into your double-layered board is continuously satisfying. At the end of a game, if you fill all twenty spots, you may find yourself leaning back and just basking in the multihued glow of your little work of art (perfectly imperfect though it’s likely to be from a scoring perspective). And you’d have every right to do so. You made that. You know, you’re something of an artist yourself.


Just a few spots left to fill...
Sagrada is solitary.

Sagrada is very much a heads-down experience. If you interact with other players anywhere, it’s by hate drafting a die you know they need. Practically, however, the occasions on which you’ll purposefully scoop someone’s draft pick in Sagrada are very few. Completing your own window becomes such a high wire act that you can't afford to make many draft decisions according to anything but your own needs. In most games, it wasn’t unusual if our first time really looking closely at another player’s board came after the final round ended. And really, that’s okay.

Sagrada is tight.

Sagrada’s dice drafting mechanics are tight and rewarding without the need for any additional interaction. I might care what you take from the draft pool, but not what you do with it after. A fresh pool of dice appears and begins shrinking steadily as each round progresses, and this helps nearly every draft choice feel meaningful regardless of turn order. The pattern building mechanics, also tight and rewarding, are defined by a blanket prohibition against placing dice of the same color or value next to one another as well as unique restrictions set by your chosen window pattern card.

Sagrada presents you with a new puzzle every time you play. And these puzzles! Each window pattern card combines with three randomly selected public scoring objectives and your randomly selected private objective to create a spatial puzzle that feels like being stuck in a Death Star garbage compactor. As the ten rounds tick by, you’re progressively running out of room and time. That first handful of placements were easy choices, but they weren’t without consequence, and soon you’re going to need a green die that isn’t a two or a four or a five or a six… If it doesn’t show up next round, you may have to turn to one of the three randomly selected tool cards and cash in some favor for a little deus ex machina.


Six-Sided Shards
A few of the tool cards might be hard to understand at first, particularly those that allow you to move a die and selectively ignore a placement rule. Several of the tools are basically irrelevant except in certain phases of the game, but that may not be clear to newcomers. Sagrada’s dice are also small and light enough that it is sometimes hard to pick them up without accidentally turning them when you just want to verify your underlying window pattern's restrictions. The otherwise pleasant experience of handling the dice can be a bit fiddly in this way. If you have big fingers, you may not appreciate the narrow confines of a nearly complete window.

Sagrada is incomplete.

True to its inspiration, Sagrada is incomplete. The base game rules have you set up the dice bag in such a way that randomness can spoil a game by simply never showing you enough dice in the colors or shades that matter to you. Thankfully, there is a solution: the Sagrada: 5-6 Player Expansion. Even if you’re only playing at 2p, this expansion brings with it rules and components for private dice pools. This new mechanic throws a zero-sum blanket over the base game’s high-variance drafting mechanics, at least when it comes to dice color. For us, private dice pools improve the experience so much, speeding up the game and rebalancing one half of the input randomness, that it feels like they should have been included in the base game.

Sagrada also has a solo mode, and it too leaves something to be desired. By mixing up the drafting and pattern building puzzles, solitaire Sagrada manages to be interesting for a few plays. Sadly, the high input randomness problem is even worse here. If the randomly selected objective and tool cards aren’t favorable, you’ll likely have no plausible path to victory on any but the easiest difficulty levels. The “Light Shades” objective card that calls for you to assemble sets of 1s and 2s in your window is crippling, for instance. In solo play, you want those low value dice on the round tracker, not in your window. You can find unofficial solo variants online to try out, at least.

Sagrada
(Image: Floodgate Games (Publisher))
Play Sagrada.

Sagrada is very good. You should play it. And if it clicks with you, you should probably own a copy. In this box, you're getting solidly replayable gameplay, high production values, and a theme that adds beautiful buckets of color to an otherwise abstract puzzle. Sagrada's low complexity makes it suitable as a gateway game or main course for a family game night, and the components really seal the deal in that setting. The Steam and Android apps are pretty nice as well, but you won’t find the private dice pool rules in digital.

Or don’t.

If you agree with me about the private dice pools, the 5-6 Player Expansion takes the total cost for Sagrada up to about US$60. At that price range, you’ll need to revisit the game many times to justify the expense. And while I think the private dice pool rules are essential, for some they may amplify analysis paralysis. If that’s you, the more random base game drafting rules may be the only way. Or consider a mechanically adjacent game like Azul or perhaps Calicoor Mille Fiori for something with a bit more interaction and crunch.

Good luck and have fun!

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