Sagrada

Sagrada, designed by Adrian Adamescu and Daryl Andrews, is a dice-drafting puzzle for one to four players. Each of you is a craftsperson building a stained-glass window, one die at a time. The dice supply the colour and the light (their number is the “shade”, from pale 1 to dark 6), and a tight web of placement rules turns every draft into a decision. It plays in around half an hour and looks gorgeous on the table.

The dice and how you draft

The bag holds dice in five colours — red, yellow, green, blue and purple. Each turn a set number of dice are drawn from the bag and rolled into a shared pool (more players means more dice in the pool). Over ten rounds, players take turns drafting one die at a time from that pool.

Drafting uses a snake order: the turn order runs down the table and then back up again, so each player picks twice per round — once on the way out, once on the way back — and the last player in line gets two picks in a row. Any dice left in the pool at the end of a round advance the round marker and are set aside for final scoring on some tools.

Placing dice & the rules

Your window is a grid of twenty spaces (five across, four down). Some cells are pre-printed with a colour restriction or a shade restriction (a number 1–6); a die placed there must match it. On top of that, three rules always apply:

• First die — your very first placed die must go on an edge or corner space.
• Adjacency — every die after the first must be placed next to a die already on the board, counting orthogonal and diagonal neighbours.
• No matching neighbours — two dice that are orthogonally adjacent (side by side, not diagonal) may never share the same colour or the same number.

These constraints tighten as the window fills; late in the game you’ll often have a die in hand and nowhere legal to put it. Each window board also has a difficulty rating that sets how many favour tokens you start with — the currency for tools.

Tools & objectives — how you score

Add favour tokens you never spent (1 point each) and you have your final score. Highest total wins.

Winning strategy

• Plan around your private objective. It rewards the summed values of one colour, so quietly favour high-number dice of that colour when the pool offers them — a few dark (5–6) dice in your secret colour add up fast.
• Read the public objectives early. They shape the whole window; know before round one whether you’re chasing colour-varied columns, shade-varied rows or number sets, and place accordingly.
• Respect adjacency from the start. Scatter dice too freely and you’ll strand yourself with legal dice you can’t place. Grow the window as a connected shape.
• Hold difficult cells for last. A cell demanding a specific colour and whose neighbours forbid certain values is the hardest to satisfy — keep options open around it.
• Time your tools. Favour tokens are scarce and the second use of a tool costs double. Save them for the moment a single flip or move rescues several points — or fills the space that would otherwise cost you.
• Avoid empty spaces. Each blank costs a point, so a “safe” but legal placement often beats holding out for the perfect die that never comes.

Common mistakes

• Forgetting diagonal adjacency. Dice may be placed diagonally, but the same-colour / same-number ban only applies to orthogonal neighbours — players confuse the two constantly.
• Ignoring the empty-space penalty. Chasing your private objective while leaving holes can quietly hand the game to a tidier, fuller window.
• Hoarding favour tokens. Tokens left over score only 1 point each; a tool used at the right moment is usually worth far more.
• Drafting greedily for one objective. The public objectives score for everyone — build only for your secret colour and you’ll miss easy shared points.
• Painting yourself into a corner. Place without thinking about which cells you still need to fill, and the endgame leaves you with unplaceable dice and lost points.

Curious how often a colour or number turns up when you draft? Roll a pool of dice in your browser and watch the spread.

Keep reading: the monster dice-fest King of Tokyo.