Sagrada - 2026 Edition

The most noticeable difference is that the new game is much lighter and brighter, and the cathedral boards are shaped slightly differently.

However, of much more interest are the two subtle but significant rule alterations.

In the original Sagrada, you started with all 90 of the dice in the draw bag (18 of each of 5 colours), regardless of the number of players; the new rule is that fewer dice are used for lower numbers of players (10 of each colour for 2 players and 14 of each for 3), which balances the distribution of colours so that statistically players have the same experience across different player counts. This change probably won’t affect casual players, but could be noticed by experts.

Second, the game has public objectives and private ones. The public ones score on numbers of dice in particular patterns, and in the older version, the private ones score on the total value of all dice of a particular colour in your window. The consequences of this are that the contribution to the final score of private objectives could swamp that from the public ones, and that people would tend to chase higher dice values where they could. In the 2026 version, the private objectives use the count of dice, not their pips (the public ones remain the same). This does balance the score contributions of both types of objective, but also alters the competition for high values—I’m not sure yet what difference that makes to play.