Sagrada, het spel van Adrian Adamescu

Can you tell us something about yourself? For example, do you have a relationship, children, pets? How do you live? What do you do for a living? Do you have any other hobbies? Tell, tell, tell!
I have been married to my wife for 14 years and together we have 4 children, a pet hamster and a fish. We live in a small townhouse, in a small city, about 1 hour away from Toronto, Canada. I have degrees in Mathematics and Chemistry and worked as a Researcher for a few years. I now do game design full time. My hobbies (outside of boardgames) are walking, reading and playing guitar.

The game we are going to talk about today, can you please introduce that to us?
Sagrada, is the game I'm mostly known for and my first real success. It went first to Kickstarter in 2016 and was published in 2017 by Floodgate Games.

What kind of game is it?
Sagrada is a dice drafting game where you create a stained glass window out of translucent dice.

In what does your game differ from similar (same type) games?
Sagrada is a puzzle game that uses the 5-Color Theorem. The theorem states that you can color the regions of any map using only 5 colors in such a way that no two regions of the same colors touch. I thought that was a great idea for a game with dice where no two dice of the same color touch. To bring it full circle, our next game Sagrada Artisans will actually have colored pencils where you get to draw the stained glass window.

It was published by which publisher?
Floodgate Games.

Is it still for sale? What's the price?
Yes, it is still selling. The current price on Amazon.com is $40.

Do you think that's a good price? Is it worth this?
I think that is a very good price in the current market. Sagrada also has very high replay-ability. You have different scoring, different tools and different windows each time you play. No two games will ever be the same, so you can get a lot of games out of your $40.

When did you come up with it and what exactly triggered that first ideas?
The idea of the game came to me when I was musing about the 5-color theorem while driving. When I had the idea I drove straight to my local game store and bought 100 dice to try it out.

Can you tell us about the development process. How does something like this work for you?
Sagrada is a co-design with Daryl Andrews. He was the one to think about the stained glass windows of the Sagrada Familia after visiting it with his wife that summer. So we developed it with that in mind. I really enjoy co-designing, you always have someone to bounce ideas with and test right away.

Did you get help from others, are there people you play the prototypes with?
Yes, we have a local testing group where we test each other's games. For Sagrada my first few playtests were with my wife, the owner of a boardgame cafe and Daryl who later joined as co-designer.

When you went searching for a publisher. Was this a hard road??
Daryl is the one that found the Publisher and yes, he says it was a hard road. Everyone was scared to publish a game with 90 dice, but eventually Floodgate Games saw the game's potential and we signed it. We were also pretty new in the industry at the time and not a lot of people knew us. Meetings with publishers were hard to get. It's different now.

Then the publisher is going to produce it... do you still have contact or influence in that process on how it will look?
Sometimes the publisher (usually the smaller publishers) keep us in the loop with what is happening with the game, how testing and development goes. Some even show us the how the art is coming along. Others however don't tell us much after the game is signed.

Finally the game is ready and the boxes are in the shops. What is your role then?
Once the game is out I try to promote it through Social Media. With Sagrada, because it was a success we kept working on various Expansions and ultimately on a Legacy version, called Sagrada Artisans. I would say Sagrada Artisans was the biggest project of my life. It took a lot of hours of developing and testing.

In which countries (and languages) has your game been released?
I think Sagrada is currently published in 15 languages including English, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Korean and even in my native language Romanian. (I live in Canada but my parents immigrated from Romania when I was 13)

Are you currently working on expansions, or busy with another game?
Sagrada has already had 4 expansion so I think that part is done. There are other ideas for the game, but we want to see how Sagrada Artisans (the Legacy version) is doing before we go on. Of course there are also other projects I am working on. I usually work on 5 or 6 games at a time with various co-designers.

Are you now a full-time professional game developper?
Yes, I work on game design full time now.

If you could start all over making your first game, what mistake would you not make again?
My first published game was a small card game called Rival Kings. It was originally a 2 player game, but the publishers wanted to turn it into a 2 to 4 player game. That change took something away from the game. I understand it now from a publisher's perspective, but I think I would push harder for it stay at just the 2 player if I would do it over again.

Are there other game makers who you admire and why?
I usually play lighter family games and I really appreciate designers like Phil Walker Harding and Paolo Mori. Their games have depth, last less than an hour and some can play up to 6 players (which is really important for us - a family of 6).

And illustrators, are you a fan of any of them?
Kwanchai Moriya is my favorite board game artist. He has done the art for 2 of my games (7 Summits and Gangster's Dilemma) and I always admired his work.

Do you want to say anything else. Did I forget to ask something?
Game Design has been very fulfilling for me. It is very creative process and keeps life interesting. I always wonder what I will come up with next. I also really like to co-design with other designers, since two brains are always better than one.

Did you enjoy this interview?
Yes.