Sagrada

After a few days of primarily playing child games, today, we played a favourite of mine that I had not tried with Toby(3) before (Jack(6) had played it once before a year or so ago).

My Usual Disclaimer: My boys have grown up playing games and as such are usually capable of games beyond their years. Your mileage may vary based on your child’s ability to read, attention span and interest.

That game is Sagrada. Sagrada is a dice drafting game based around the idea of making stain glass windows for the Sagrada Familia (my favourite building in the whole world and looks like something out of a fantasy novel).

The game is simple. You each get a stain-glass window and a pattern card. These pattern cards are arranged in difficulty. In the official rules, you get more tokens to use powers with more difficult boards but we used the more difficult boards as a way of handicapping all of us (Toby(3) had an easy board, Jack(6) had a medium board and I had a hardboard (worst mistake of the day)).

You then take 7 dice out of the bag and roll. you then have to take turns drafting dice and placing them on your window following a number of rules:

1. the First die must be on the edge

2. All subsequent dice must be next to another dice (diagonals count)

3. Any colour or number on your board must have a dice of that colour or number placed on it.

4. No 2 colours or numbers the same can be next to each other (diagonals do not count)

Each of you secretly draws a colour of dice that you score points from and there are a number of other achievements to score such as no columns with the same colour etc.

There are also “powers” you can use that let you do things like rerolling dice. I chose these so they were simple powers for toby but you are meant to pick these at random.

In the end, we had a very tense and enjoyable game which both boys really enjoyed. Jack owned me (and clearly needed the same board difficulty as me) and Toby loved it. It’s a simple game with enough complexity that can simply be drafting dice and following some patterns or can get very tactical.

The only thing Toby struggled with rule wise was the fact diagonal touching counted in some situations and not in others that is super weird.

The components in this game are beautiful and have very high production values… equally putting your hand into a nice bag of 40 dice is very enjoyable. If you have a larger family there is also a 5th&6th player expansion.

Sagrada is a game that I really like and it plays well with adults and can be easily dialled back to work with kids. The difficulties on the board although not official are a great way to handicap different age/ability players. There is no reading in this game and all that is needed is colour and number recognition.

Toby can recognise number patterns on a dice quicker than he can recognise actual numbers… sigh…

My kids love this type of gameplay so this was always going to be a hit but this is a definite recommendation from me if you are looking for more of an adult board game that can also be played with kids.

For the eagle-eyed amongst you please ignore my illegal placement of 2 dice. I assure you it was an accident… and there was me trying to help Toy place dice correctly who was perfectly capable.