For my next board game post I am going to talk about a new-to-me game called Sagrada. My husband and I help host a monthly game night at the co-working space where he works. We teach people how to play some of our favorite games and sometimes someone brings along something new that we get to learn. This week we got to try Sagrada, which is a sort of puzzle game with dice.
Sagrada
Each player’s game board looks like a stained glass window and players take turns rolling a handful of brightly colored dice and placing them in the window spaces. Each person chooses a pattern for their window from a deck of cards. This part of the game is clever because the card slides into the player board, so you get a new pattern to play each time you play the game.
The game play is really simple. Players take turns rolling dice, picking and placing them. The interesting part of the game is figuring out how to place them. There are a few rules: the same color or number value of dice can’t be next to each other. The pattern in your window has symbols that tell you what can be placed there. A white tile means it’s like a wild, but there are colored spaces where you can only place a dice of the same color and numbered spaces which can only hold the same number.
There are also a collection of patterns that you are trying to make that will score you extra points. I lost my first game because I totally wasn’t paying enough attention to that. In our game the goals were to have sets of all 5 colors (red, yellow, green, blue, purple), pairs of 3s and 4s, and sets of all 6 numbers. I didn’t have enough 1s to make sets in my game board, so I totally missed out on those points. You also get a very limited number of gemstones that let you use special bonus tools that give you the ability to flip a dice to another number or move one that you’ve already placed on the board.
I think this would be a great game for a family weekend, which is why I wanted to write about it before the Thanksgiving holiday. It would work for a wide range of ages and it is really quick to learn and fast to play. Officially the game says ages 14+, but you could absolutely do this with younger ones. The game play might not be as strategic, but they could totally keep up. Our group actually just sat and watched this quick video which taught us the game in about 5 minutes and we were ready to go. It’s designed for 4 players, but when I checked it out online, I found an expansion available for 5-6 players, so you can get a larger group involved too.
I encourage you to find it at your local games store, but here’s also a link to find it on Amazon: Sagrada
All the games in this blog post series will be featured on my Game Night “Idea List” on Amazon.
If you want to dig in to more in-depth reviews, video tutorials and more, you can check it out on Board Game Geek.