{"id":9593,"date":"2022-10-27T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-27T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9593"},"modified":"2022-10-27T01:01:48","modified_gmt":"2022-10-27T05:01:48","slug":"the-red-cathedral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/27\/the-red-cathedral\/","title":{"rendered":"The Red Cathedral."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Red Cathedral slipped through the cracks of my reviews over at Paste, as it came out at the very end of 2020, and I didn\u2019t get a copy until Gen Con of 2021, so it missed my 2020 best-new-games list but was ineligible for the 2021 list. I\u2019ve played it a few times now, including its very good solo mode, and I have to say it\u2019s one of the best games of its weight (sort of medium-heavy) I\u2019ve ever played, and is both great value at under $35<\/a> and for such a small box.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Players in the Red Cathedral will work to construct the building of the game\u2019s title, which has six sections per player and varies slightly in shape in each game, with base, middle, and top sections that can be accentuated with different ornaments. Players move dice in six colors around a rondel to gather resources they can use to build sections or ornaments, or to collect coins, but choosing which die to move isn\u2019t as simple as just figuring out what resource you want \u2013 you can get much more stuff if you pick the right one, or you might not move a die to prevent your opponents from getting an even bigger windfall. You gain points mostly for building cathedral sections and ornaments, although there are other ways to gain a point here or there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are two scoring tracks in The Red Cathedral, although they\u2019re overlaid on each other and you don\u2019t have to keep track of two separate point totals (like in Rajas of the Ganges, although I like how that determines the end of the game). There\u2019s the Reputation point track, which just looks like a regular scoring track around the edge of any game board; and the Prestige track, which starts out with a marker every 4-5 spots, but those gaps quickly drop to 3 spots and then 2, eventually lining up with the Reputation track in the 40s. This matters a lot early in the game, because you can drop down one Prestige point to gain two coins, and because placing ornaments gains you one or three Prestige points depending on whether you add one gem or two (in the two colors) to the cost. You can only build an ornament on a section that\u2019s already completed, although you can do so on someone else\u2019s section. You\u2019re limited to four ornaments, two for middle sections and one each for the top and bottom sections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dice rondel is the real heart of the game and its most clever aspect. There are eighteen spaces on the circular track, divided into six zones. At the start of the game, the five dice go into five separate zones after someone has rolled them all. On your turn, you may pick any die and move it forward the number of zones shown on its face (1 to 6). Then you collect the reward for that zone, resources, coins, or points, times the number of dice currently in that zone, which can be up to three \u2013 so you might get, say, 6 bricks, or 3 green gems. Then you re-roll all dice in that zone for the next player.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each zone also has a \u201cguild\u201d card next to it that offers you a choice of two benefits when you move a die to that quadrant of the rondel. For most of those cards, which change every game, you can choose either something for free, or you can pay coins\/exchange resources for something better. Thus every time you choose moving a die as your main action, you have to consider where the other dice are, what resources you\u2019ll get, what guild card is there, and how this might leave the dice for the next player.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your other choices of actions are to place one of your six banners on an unclaimed segment of the cathedral or deliver resources to a building site to complete a section or build an ornament. Four of those six banners start out in spaces in your inventory, which can hold up to ten resources when all the banners are placed, so you have a strong incentive to get out and claim some sections early on to free up room on your board. Delivering resources is the one frustrating part of the game: you can only deliver up to three resources in one turn, but many sections require four or five resources to complete, so it\u2019ll take you two separate turns to do it. You can, however, deliver to multiple sites at once, so a little more planning can make this less inefficient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The game ends when someone completes their sixth section, after which you add up the scores. Most of your points come from completing sections, which vary in their returns and may give you some coins but fewer points rather than just a higher point total; and ornaments, which, as I wrote above, come in the form of Prestige points and are more valuable earlier in the game. Ornaments only require one or two resources to build, but if you can also spend one green and one purple gem when building one, you max out your turn with three Prestige points.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a>\n\n\n\n

The box suggests a game time of 80 minutes, which is probably true when everyone knows the game; the last time I played, with two friends who hadn\u2019t played before, we ran closer to two hours for the full game, although I can say all three of us felt like it was a great game. (I lost, though.) There is a smart solo mode here that works well to mess with you by limiting your options, although I think it\u2019s far more satisfying to play this with at least one other person so that the competitive aspect of dice selection comes into play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is an expansion called Contractors that came out earlier this year, which adds a lot of new elements, including another game board, diamonds as a wild resource, an additional (black) die, and more. The more games I play, the more skeptical I become of the majority of expansions; a few are good, like Pandemic\u2019s On the Brink, Ticket to Ride\u2019s 1910 (even if just for the full-sized cards), or Carcassonne\u2019s Traders and Builders, but most just complicate the original\u2019s game play without making it truly better. I can\u2019t tell you if Contractors does that, because I saw it on a table at Gen Con and watched a little bit of game play, after which I thought, \u201cI don\u2019t need that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Red Cathedral slipped through the cracks of my reviews over at Paste, as it came out at the very end of 2020, and I didn\u2019t get a copy until Gen Con of 2021, so it missed my 2020 best-new-games list but was ineligible for the 2021 list. I\u2019ve played it a few times now, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[60,462,761,161,451],"class_list":["post-9593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-boardgames","tag-complex-games","tag-dice-games","tag-highly-recommended","tag-strategy-games","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9593"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9599,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9593\/revisions\/9599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}