The Red Cathedral

In sixteenth century Russia, Ivan the Terrible commissioned the building of St Basil’s cathedral, Moscow. It took a decade. Four and a half centuries later, this stunning building is still standing – but will you be after you attempt to recreate it’s construction?

There’s three main things to consider as you open the box. Each player has a player board that tracks both how many resources they have and how they have upgraded their actions – more on that momentarily. There’s the cathedral itself – formed of cards laid out representing various sections of the building – and there’s the market board, which is really the heart of how the game functions.

On your turn you’ll choose one of three actions: claiming a section of the cathedral to build; moving resources from your board to one of your sections under construction, or gathering resources at the market. The first two actions are very simple: to claim a section of the cathedral as one you intend to build, you simply put a banner on any section that hasn’t yet been claimed, as long as any sections beneath it are either built or already under construction. You take the workshop tile there too – these will improve your actions at the market, as we’ll see.

Moving resources is just how it sounds: you can move up to three resources to any sections of the cathedral you’re currently working on. If doing so means that that section of the cathedral is now complete, you take the rewards (money/points) and flip the card over, keeping your banner there to show you built it.

The market board functions as a kind of wheel that dice move around. When you gather resources, you simply move a chosen die the number of spaces it shows on its face-up side, and then gather wood, stone, gold, or whatever, from the section the die stops in: the number of resources you gather is the token there (eg 1 gold or 2 bricks) multiplied by the number of dice in that section. Time it right, and you can pick up a lot of stuff like this. If you’ve added workshop tiles to a particular die, moving that will trigger whatever bonus the workshop offers: it might be an additional resource, a bit of cash, or the reward for wherever another coloured-die happens to be in that moment. Finally – if the market wasn’t already alluring enough – you also get to do a special action; there being one in each quadrant of the market. These vary from game to game but are all relatively simple assistance: turn 2 of one resource into 1 of another type of thing. Once you’ve done these three actions – in any order – you roll all the dice in the section you used to end your turn. The resource conversion is in fact very handy – both because the amount of resources you can store on your board is finite, and because each section of the cathedral can demand up to three different kinds of resource.

And it’s the disconnect between the gathering of resources and spending them that you manage in the Red Cathedral, because if, say, you need stone wood and gems for a particular section, you can bet your bottom dollar the dice will arrange themselves in such a way that the best moves are going for gold, bricks and cash instead…

Cash is useful in The Red Cathedral not because it contributes to the cathedral itself – it doesn’t – but because it allows you to manipulate dice movement. Every player can move any die they like, but one specific colour is ‘your’ colour, which means you can pay a coins to move it one or more sections further (or less far) than it might otherwise move. What might sound like a handy option can at times prove critical!

The final thing to consider here is the end-game and scoring. As soon as any one player builds their final section of cathedral (ie all their banners are used up) everyone else gets one final turn, and then each ‘column’ of the building rewards points based on who contributed the most. This majority-scoring gives The Red Cathedral a slight tension and edge as the game hits the final straight, with everyone seeking to maximise their contributions as time runs out…