#sagrada

Cuando mi voz se vuelve silencio y tu existencia poesía

hacemos visible lo que nos une.

Para amarse solo se necesita esa oquedad

sagrada donde solo dos caben.

Sagrada is a dice-drafting puzzle game, released in 2017 by designers Adrian Adamescu and Daryl Andrews. The game was nominated for a handful of awards in 2017 and the following years. In Sagrada, players take on the role of glaziers and designers building stained glass windows for the Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona.

The game starts by players selecting a set of restrictions that are slotted into their player boards, followed by a player taking two dice per player from the bag, rolling them, and putting them in the display to be chosen from for that round. Then that player chooses one die, places it on their board following the slotted restrictions, with orthogonally-adjacent dice of the same number or colour being illegal. The next player than chooses a die to take from the display, and so forth, until the last player’s time to choose. That player then gets to pick two of the dice to place, and the selection order reverses, with that round’s starting player being the last to choose a die as well. Play continues until each player has chosen 20 dice, and slotted them according to their restrictions, the public objectives, and their private objectives. Points are tallied on the scoreboard (pictured above), with most points winning.

Game design by Daryl Andrews and Adrian Adamescu. Published by Floodgate Games.

Overall Grade: B

Genre: Dice drafting

Price: $$

Players: 1-4, ages 10+

Time: 5 minutes setup + 30 - 45 minutes playtime

Summary: Build something beautiful, and ruin your friends' plans, as you compete to create a stained-glass window out of colorful dice. Strategize to meet goals or prevent others from meeting theirs, adhere to design restrictions, and spend favors to access useful tools. The player who can earn the most victory points is the winner!

Recommended for: Casual game nights, artsy folks, and dragons that hoard dice.

Dziś po raz pierwszy byłam w Barcelonie. I nie wiem czy bardziej czułam się jak w Pradze, czy jak Rzymie, czy jak w Londynie.

En tu presencia, me convierto en un loco risueño, como un niño travieso, cautivado por tu encanto. Anheló un tiempo junto a ti, eterno, sin final, donde minutos, horas, años, sean solo un ritual.

Eres mi dulce perdición, mi dicha infinita, mi razón de existir, mi alma bendita. En el abismo de tu amor, me sumerjo sin temor, deseando que este hechizo sea eterno, mi amor.

Bajo tus encantos, soy un ser manipulable, tu sonrisa, un embrujo, volviéndome vulnerable. Cada momento contigo es pura felicidad, anhelando que nunca termine, esa eternidad.

Así, me transformo en un ser irresponsable, perdido en tus ojos, volando hacia lo inimaginable. Quiero que nuestro tiempo juntos se perpetúe, en un cuento interminable, donde solo existas tú.

Y así, bajo el influjo de tu amor, sin tregua, me entrego sin resistencia, sin ninguna refriega. Eres mi motivo de existir, mi razón verdadera, deseo que este sueño nunca se desespera.

Game 1: Sagrada.

Score: 98 out of 115 Nautis.

Review: I went into the board game cafe wanting to play something iconic, something I'd seen played, reviewed, photographed and loved online but haven't personally picked up yet. Sagrada, being the shiniest thing on the shelf, qualified. I had seen pictures of peoples' completed boards before - a little thing fell out of the box when we opened it, in fact, encouraging people to post them - but without context, all I was left to do was stare at the shiny dice and pristine boards without any idea what it meant. It felt arcane, almost, this clearly meaningful, beautiful thing with a secret code that I could not comprehend by sight alone.

And now I've played it. I understand the code. I still can't explain at a glance what the hell is going on.

Sagrada is a very tight, carefully-considered dice-placement game that absolutely would not work for my spectacle-poisoned brain if it wasn't as effortlessly pretty as it is. At its base level, it's fairly simple: You draft dice from a centrally-rolled pool, starting by placing one on the edge of your board and building out from there, restricted primarily by board spaces showing which number or color must be placed and a general rule that adjacent color or number matches can never be placed. From there, it's a matter of keeping this in your head, along with both private and public scoring goals, through rounds of shifting circumstances leading to, hopefully, a completed window of lovely, hateful color.

In practice, Sagrada is a game about picking a die, placing a die, smiling placidly at your board, and immediately going, "Oh! I've fucked myself." This, turn after turn, game after game, because Sagrada manages to find the balance where there's just enough information to kind of know what you're doing but just slightly more than is comfortable to keep it in your head all at once.

It's an enjoyable thing, the kind of pleasing, strategic play that makes you feel alternately brilliant and idiotic, intricate and incomprehensible from outside. I have not photographed my game board because I am bad at this and they are shameful masses of mostly purple.

Game 2: 5 Minute Mystery

Score: .65561920 out of 1.0 Otheros.

Review: 5 Minute Mystery is a hard game to qualify and this, primarily, because it barely feels like a game. It's got all the requisite game parts and objectives, it sits on the shelf with the other games, it's possible to win and lose, but still, it doesn't quite feel like a game. It feels like a toy. Let me explain.

The major difference between a toy and a game, as I understand it, is victory. It's possible to lose a game. And with this, it's very possible to lose 5 Minute Mystery; in fact, you'll probably do so immediately. But the overall structure is engaged with like a toy, with the same sort of poking, prodding, shaking, jostling, and discarding on the floor to go drink juice that you'd do with a toy.

It has lovely, toylike components. Central to 5 Minute Mystery is this hexagonal puzzle-cylinder thing that clicks and shifts intriguingly. The way you play with it is by identifying hidden symbols in various clue cards, locking in matching symbols on the cylinder, and checking them against an answer key: this leads you to a clue, which helps eliminate or identify suspects in the terrible crime of "who stole my hat" or "I fell asleep and lost track of my pocketwatch".

The other central component of 5 Minute Mystery is the titular five minutes, or rather, the strict timer (which isn't always 5 minutes!) you're given to identify the culprit. This is the main element of pressure in the game, as time is in everything ever. The way the game engages you over a longer period is by providing multiple mysteries over multiple rounds, running through a progression of perfidy until you're just sort of done.

And this is where it feels like a toy: You just sort of play 5 Minute Mystery until you're done with it. You read the rulebook, fail at the first mystery, figure it out, and so immediately master it. You do the weird mysteries where you can't talk to each other and that's about it, you've done all you need to do. You put it on the shelf.

This game would very much benefit from talking to the Escape or Exit people and merging their mechanics. Escape-room games are built around single-session chained progression play and are, primarily, limited by being a card medium unable to engage the player on a more tactile level. They fit each other's failings. Absent that progression, the failings stand out starker.

Game 3: Happy Dim Sum

Score: 🍮 out of 🍑 🍜s.

Review: This was our end-of-night "We're going to pass out in half an hour" palate-cleanser game, a spot usually reserved for things we have no attachment to and just want to screw around with. And boy, Happy Dim Sum worked, primarily because it was so immediately charming and flavorful and easily carried that flavor through its entire run of mechanics.

The narrative idea behind Happy Dim Sum is that you're sitting around a restaurant table with your friends, who you love, and who you also want to kill. With food. You want to fill your loved ones with so much dim sum that they fall over, an overstuffed, insensate wreck, ideally while you're also picking up the check. They have the same goals, so it's a back and forth of politely forcing food onto each other, calling toasts so they have to eat your spring rolls, and covertly overspicing the cabbage rolls so that you cannot possibly eat them, it's okay, you can have them, it's already paid for, go ahead.

The entire endeavor is a gamification of an already delicate social procedure and just invites immediate narrative buy-in from anyone who's ever experienced it. You click your fingers together like chopsticks when the Chopsticks card has you steal a card from another player. You dread grandma coming around because she will make you eat, you can't refuse her. Check battles come with the kind of exaggerated puffed-chest generosity that playacts the wonderful reality already occurring in thousands of restaurants worldwide. It's culturally universal: If you married into an Italian family, or a Greek one, or a Jewish one, anything, you've been killed by the appropriate foods in the exact same way. Chances are, one of your players is already in an all-too-familiar food coma.