We played Sagrada today. This is a dice-drafting game, which I got a few years ago as a birthday gift from my friend, Brian. It's an interesting game to me, and unique in style for my game collection. It has been a while since we got this game out, but I hope to see it hit the table more this year.
In drafting games, each player is choosing from a set of something, usually cards, trying to pick the best thing for their own needs while attempting to thwart the plans of their opponents. In Sagrada, dice are the components to choose from, and these dice need to be placed on a player's personal board in order to make a stained-glass window that matches the requirements. Players are mostly restricted in what they place by the other dice that they have already placed, but there are also sections on each board that have additional restrictions, such as allowing only dice of a particular color or value. Each round, dice are randomly selected from a bag and rolled, giving players the colors and values that they must figure out how to place. In the end, after 10 rounds, players get points by meeting other requirements in the forms of personal and public goals.
Today, Beth started the game, with Isaac going second, and I followed. The first few rounds of the game were spent getting familiar with the game again, so I don't think any of us had any good plans to start with. One of the Tool cards that we had available was allowing us to move two dice of the same color, as long as that color was displayed as a round marker, but for the first half of the game we only had green and purple, while I had some blue and red dice that I needed to move due to an early mistake. Unfortunately, I hadn't properly considered how many Favor Tokens that I had in order to use the Tool, so I was only able to make part of my necessary adjustment before I had used up my Favors. Isaac also effectively used a Tool that allowed him to take 2 dice at the same time, which really hurt me because I needed at least 1 of the 2 dice that he had grabbed. Isaac won the game, with nearly double my score, and Beth was close behind him.
