As many of you know we have been closed while we went on vacation.  Part of that vacation took us to Barcelona. 

And what do board game people do on a beautiful, warm evening in Barcelona, while drinking cocktails at a rooftop bar with the spires of the Sagrada Família rising up in the distance across the magical city skyline?? 

We played Sagrada — the gorgeous stained glass dice game!

Was it a little extra? Absolutely. Did we get some strange looks?  Of course.  Do we regret it? Not even a little.

How This Happened

We had Sagrada in the suitcase before we even left Florida — partly because we'd been meaning to play it more, and partly because, well… how could we not? When you know you're going to be in Barcelona and you are going to be seeing in person one of the most famous stained-glass buildings on the planet, you bring the stained-glass dice game. That's just logic.

We set the game up at the rooftop bar with drinks in hand and the Barcelona skyline stretched out around us — and there it was, the Sagrada Família, those unmistakable spires visible right from our table. A few other guests wandered over to see what we were doing, and once we explained the game — and the joke — they absolutely loved it. It was one of those perfect travel moments you honestly couldn't have planned any better.

A Quick Overview of Sagrada

If you haven't played Sagrada yet, here's the short version: it's a dice drafting and placement game designed by Daryl Andrews and Adrian Adamescu, published by Floodgate Games. Players are competing to complete their own stained-glass window by placing colored and numbered dice onto their personal player board according to specific color and shade restrictions.

Each round, a pool of dice is rolled and players take turns drafting one die to place on their window. The catch? No two adjacent dice can share the same color or the same number. It sounds simple, but it gets wonderfully tricky fast.

The game plays 1-4 players and runs about 30-45 minutes. It's one of those games that looks stunning on the table — and that point was not lost on us given our surroundings.

Game Components

We want to take a moment to appreciate just how beautiful this game is, because sitting with an actual architectural masterpiece on the horizon really puts things in perspective — and Sagrada held its own.

The dice are translucent and jewel-toned, in red, yellow, blue, green, and purple. When the afternoon Barcelona sun hit them on the table, they genuinely sparkled. The window pattern cards are colorful and well-illustrated. The tool cards and public objective cards are clear and well laid out. And the player boards with their window frames are a lovely tactile touch.

Dose it take you breath away like the century-in-the-making cathedral? Not quite. But for a box of cardboard and resin, it really does capture the spirit of stained glass beautifully. It's one of those rare games where the theme and the components feel genuinely matched.

Gameplay

We played a two-player game, and the setting added an almost silly amount of atmosphere.

For those unfamiliar, each player starts with a Window Pattern Card — these come in varying difficulty levels, and you want to pick one that matches your risk tolerance. The harder the pattern, the more favor tokens you get to spend on tool cards throughout the game. Those tool cards let you bend the rules in clever ways: move a die, draft from the bag, flip a die to its opposite face, and so on.

The dice drafting is where the game really shines. On each of the ten rounds, a number of dice equal to (players x 2 + 1) are rolled. You get two die per turn, you pick one, place it, and then the next player with the last player picking 2 die and then everyone else picking their second die in reverse order. Your first die must touch the edge of your window frame, and every die after that must be adjacent to an already-placed die. The color and shade restrictions mean you'll often watch in agony as someone takes the exact die you needed.

Three public objective cards are revealed at the start of the game, scoring everyone based on things like column color variety, row shade variety, or diagonal color chains. Each player also has a private objective — score points for a specific color based on the total pip value of those dice in your window. Balancing your private goal against the public objectives is where a lot of the strategic tension lives.

Sipping a drink on that rooftop, trying to construct our little stained-glass windows while Gaudí's masterpiece stood watch in the distance, felt genuinely poetic. Or at least, that's what we told ourselves when one of us (no names) completely botched their window by drafting too aggressively for their private color.

How Did It Play?

Really, really well. Sagrada is one of those games that's easy to teach and quick to set up, which made it ideal for a rooftop bar setting where we didn't want to be fiddling with complicated rules. The turns move fast, the decisions are meaningful but not overwhelming, and even when things go wrong with your window plan — and they will go wrong — it's a satisfying kind of wrong.

The game has just enough player interaction (primarily through die drafting denial) to keep things interesting without tipping into "take that" territory. You're not attacking anyone's window; you're just making their day slightly harder by snagging that purple 4 they were clearly eyeing. Good clean villainy.

The scoring at the end is always tighter than you expect, which means nobody is out of it until the last die is placed. We love that in a game.

The Verdict

Sagrada is a beautiful, accessible, and genuinely clever game that we'd recommend to pretty much anyone — whether you're brand new to the hobby or a seasoned gamer looking for something to bring out with family. It hits the table fast, plays in under an hour, and always looks incredible while you're doing it.

Packing it in our suitcase to take across the worls and play it in the war Barvelona sunshine with the Sagrada Família itself in the distance was, objectively, one of the best decisions we have ever made. 10/10 would schlep a board game across an ocean again.

If you haven't added Sagrada to your collection yet, now is your sign. You don't need to be in Barcelona to enjoy it — though it doesn't hurt.

Until next time, happy gaming! 

— The Detective Hawk Games Family

Note: We were not compensated for this review. We bought the game ourselves, flew it to Spain ourselves, and embarrassed ourselves in public entirely of our own free will.