Sagrada - Board Game Review

I'll admit, I am a fool for a good looking board game. Whenever I need to scratch the itch and go hunting for a new board game, I definitely go firstly by aesthetics. I've never quite let it guide my actions as with Sagrada though - the second I saw it I knew I needed it, regardless of gameplay.

Just look at it. And it is about crafting beautiful stained glass windows with colorful dice, I mean it can not get prettier than this. It had me hooked from the go. Is it any fun to play though?

Sagrada brands itself as a game about dice drafting and window crafting, and it sums it up well. If you've played a draft game before - like AQUA, Ticket to Ride or Cascadia - you've got the general idea. Players need to draft resources from a common pool to combine them and whoever scores the most points in the end wins. I've mentioned before that I enjoy the non-antagonistic nature of draft and tile placing games. While you compete for the same resources, the game isn't so much about ruining other people's play, but to optimize your own with what there is. Or at least, that is how you can choose to play it, and probably will have to if you like me are stuck mostly playing board games with little children.

In Sagrada the resources are colourful dice and the craft is your church window. At the start each player chooses a window to craft, and they come in different difficulties. Other than dice, you'll also have extra point challenges and tools to look out for. The extra point challenges are additional ways to place your dice for optimal points, and the tools allow you to fix things you've messed up (or are trying to avoid to mess up). Each player takes turn rolling a certain amount of dice (depending on number of players), and then take turns drafting from that pool. The luck factor is the same as in any draft game, you always hope what you need will turn up and that no one else will grab if before you.

The placement of the die follows some stringent rules - some dice can only be placed according to their value and some according to their colour. Add to this that you can't place two dice of the same colour/value next to each other. 

There is a lot to keep track off in other words and it is so easy to miss a placement. It's a bummer if you do, because it is not easy to try to fix it when you discover it a bit down the road. Once you've started placing other dice around it, they all become wrong. Sudoku comes to mind here, if you've played that you know the feeling. All players should help each other out in making sure the dice placement is correct, to avoid this problem.

Another issue is that dice like to roll. Despite their edgy design, they are literally made to roll around and that becomes apparent as soon as you've started gathering a few pieces onto your window. When you need to squeeze in a die between a few other it is way too easy to accidentally push them aside, flipping their sides and messing up your beautiful order. Best case scenario you need to carefully reassemble and hope your co-players don't accuse you of cheating. Worst case scenario you don't remember exactly how they were placed and you're screwed. This happens easily and is something to really keep in mind when playing the game. A knock with your elbow on the table can actually ruin a run of game if you're unlucky enough. I have this issue more or less with any game that requires tiles to be placed on the board in fragile constellations (mostly because little children's arms yank around like a marionette doll's), but Sagrada is especially sensitive to this problem.

But enough about the nitpicky, Sagrada is fun. It is fun to look at and it is fun to play. As with many draft games similar to this you can adapt the difficulty simply by adding or removing goal components. When I play with my 6 yo the goal is simply to try to complete our windows, and she loves it (the 10 wasn't appealed by pretty colours and isn't a fan of the game).  If you're playing someone with higher ambitions there are several layers of point collecting to add, and if you're really trying to get to the higher echelons you've got a real brain twister in your hands.

Sagrada of course also has a solo mode, which plays similarly as the regular and can be a fun way to kill some time in the evening. I am going to make the comparison to a round of sudoku again, but just way prettier. By now Sagrada also has a few expansion packs, that add more of the fun I am assuming. I haven't had a chance to check them out and currently I am perfectly happy with the core game as it is anyway.

All in all Sagrada ticks a lot of boxes for me - easy to grasp and set up, easily customizable for different difficulties and amazing from a tactile and aesthetic point of view - and the only way I can see you not having fun with this is if you, like my 10 yo, think colourful dice are stupid.