After my first couple solo games of Tiny Towns I changed gears, to more the more meticulus building of stained glass windows in Sagrada, and testing out the new expansion; Sagrada: The Great Facades: Passion
As I've mentioned in previous posts, Sagrada is a family favourite. Everyone seems to enjoy the colourful, dice chucking, puzzle feel. I have come to really enjoy the solo variant that comes with the base game. It's "beat your own score" but not... 😏 What I love is, it's never the same!
In solo Sagrada you roll 4-dice per round. Each round (as with the multiplayer game) you'll take 2-dice to help build your window. Whatever die are leftover in solo, go onto the round tracker. Depending on your action choices, you may have 1-3 dice on the round tracker after a round of solo. So not only do you have to choose wisely and for what you need, but you also have to be weary of the value of the dice you're putting onto the round tracker, because at the end of the 10-round game, the "A.I.'s" score (or the score to beat) is the value of ALL dice on the round tracker. 😮 So once again, every game is different.
Sagrada: The Great Facades - Passion expansion tosses in quite a bit of variety and options for you. It's a modular expansion (which I wasn't aware!), meaning you can use ALL or some of the aspects of the expansion to add to your base game of Sagrada. Cool! GF-Passion comes with 6-new "rare glass" dice, "rare glass tools" (I can't remember the official name), Inspiration cards (think 'personal ability/bonus'), new public objective cards and private objective cards (some of which help you gain points based on symmetry in your window). Cool again! 😎
What I enjoy about this expansion is that it really doesn't change the game much from what you know and love. It ADDS to it. Those are my favourite kind of expansions. GF-Passion creates additional ways to score VPs, but in doing so it also opens up MORE options for you, which also means it can "jumble your mind" a bit with the puzzle aspect BECAUSE you have more options.
One thing that took me a bit of searching on BGG to discover, is that this expansion caused an update to the solo rules. In the base game, you play the solo mode WITHOUT favour tokens. These are what you use to pay to use tools in the multiplayer game. Instead, in solo, you would use a die from the draft pool. But with this expansion, you have both options. Plus, in order to use the "rare glass" tools as you can see in this pic above, you need to pay with Favour tokens. Don't get too excited though; Those fancy "rare glass dice" are as they sound... RARE. So each player can only have ONE in their window. It's a "one and done" kind of tool.
Sagrada is one of those games that simply makes your table pretty to look at. It's so colourful! It makes me smile. 😊
In the end, the expansion really made things difficult. I lost both games. Going back into my logs, I've won four of my last five games (mind you that was earlier this year). I even played tonight on the "easiest" level, meaning 5-tools available in solo (well with the expansion, it's 4-tools + the rare glass tool). Both games ended up like the above pic; see the empty space?? That's bad. That's -1VP right there. 😣
Regardless, I enjoyed the new ways of thinking and approaching my windows with this expansion. I'm excited to share it with my wife and daughters soon hopefully. 😉