Sagrada: Passion

Sagrada is a game of “dice drafting and window crafting” from Floodgate Games where players compete to construct a stained glass window masterpiece while gaining extra prestige through the completion of public and secret objectives and even calling upon the church for favours from time to time in order to achieve their goal.

Played in a series of 10 rounds, this abstract family game by Adrian Adamescu and Daryl Andrews sees players drafting dice from a central pool and adding them to the window grid on their lavishly illustrated player boards. Players are given two window cards during set-up and can choose a window pattern from the four available sides – they all offer different dice placement options and vary in complexity.

Each round the first player will draw two dice per player, plus one additional die and roll them (so seven dice in a three-player game, for example). They will then choose a die to add to their window – the drafting continues in a clockwise direction until the last player has completed their turn – the last player will then take another turn as the drafting direction shifts to anti-clockwise, ending on the first player who will be left with a choice of two dice.

Placement rules are such that a new die must be placed adjacent (either orthogonally or diagonally) to previously placed dice and no numbers of the same value or same coloured dice are ever allowed to sit orthogonally adjacent to each other. This presents a nice little special puzzle that some often compare to the popular number-placement puzzle, Sudoku.

The Passion expansion is a modular expansion for the base game. It offers a number of different modules that can be added to change things up. First is a set of new public objective cards which may conflict with some of the base game cards. This doesn’t stop you using them but you may want to use one set or another.

Next up is inspiration cards, which offer special abilities to each player. These are dealt randomly at the start of the game. Rare Glass is a board that replaces one of the tool cards and has a number of rare glass die added to it. Players can use their favour tokens to grab a Rare Glass die and add it to their board, while it’s number is locked it is a wild colour acting as any colour for multiple objectives. Alongside this are Rare Glass Objectives which can only be used when the rest of the module is.

All in all a lot of good stuff to add to the base game that will add variety and depth!

Player Count: 1-4
Time: 30-45 Minutes
Age: 13+