Sagrada’s been around since 2017, pretty much unchanged, but with a few expansions and variants popping up since then.
That changed this month, with the launch of the 2026 version. Note that it doesn’t actually have a new name, but as the rules have changed, many people are referring to it as Sagrada 2026 to distinguish it from the previous version.
Sagrada is a dice-drafting game in which you build patterns of colours and numbers into stained glass window grids of 5×4 spaces to score points. The windows, cards selected randomly from a large set and slotted into cathedral boards, have requirements on some spaces (e.g., a red die has to go in this one, or the number 2 must appear in this other one), and there are global constraints such that two dice of either the same colour or the same number can’t be adjacent. I won’t go into the rules in detail, but you can find out more here.
What’s New?
The most noticeable difference is that the new game (on the right above) 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.
Should You Upgrade?
I’m not averse to the new design, but I also think the old one is perfectly acceptable. The rule changes are so minor that it’s completely trivial to play the old version of the game with the new rules and vice versa.
If you already have the 2017 game, it seems to me there’s little reason to upgrade, especially if you have the 5/6 player expansion as that hasn’t yet turned up with the new cathedral window design and colours.
If you don’t have any version of Sagrada, then my recommendation would be to get the one with what you consider the more appealing design… Or whichever’s cheaper!
About the author:
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
