Blueprints to Play The Red Cathedral

Blueprints to Play The Red Cathedral

We see you’ve returned, young architect!  If you haven’t read the previous article about The Red Cathedral, we recommend you do so before proceeding.

Today we will show you some of the strategies we’ve been able to discover through lots of experience playing The Red Cathedral.

Let’s Go! 

As we’ve already seen, during your turn you must execute one of 3 actions:

  1. Claim a section of the cathedral
  2. Build or decorate sections of the cathedral
  3. Acquire resources

In the case of action A, claim a section of the cathedral, we take one of our banners and put it on top of a base card of the cathedral that hasn’t already been claimed by an opponent.  If the base has already been claimed, we can claim the next highest available section of the tower.

 

 

This allows us to take the tile that is found in the same section of the cathedral and place it in our workshop.

For action B, construct sections of the cathedral, we find ourselves at a crossroads:  to build or not to build?  This is because as a player, you will be constantly acquiring different resources that will allow you to complete sections of your cathedral, and if you do that you can earn recognition points and maybe even some rubles.  So what’s the problem?  Many players will probably be waiting for you to finish building your sections so that they can then use their resources to decorate that same section.  The decorations count toward tower control at the end of the game, and if your opponent can decorate with gems they’ve acquired, they’ll also earn additional prestige points.  So be careful!  Try to avoid letting another architect steal your glory.

 

 

When it’s time to take action C, acquire resources, we always have to be mindful of where the dice land when we use them and the resource generating machine we are creating.  This is maybe the most important part of the game because it will determine what resources you can repeatedly acquire, what type of influence you can wield, and what parts of your workshop you can activate.  If you don’t quite get the hang of it initially, don’t get frustrated.  The learning curve with The Red Cathedral is quite steep – but fun- and each time you play, the matches will be different.

 

 

A few small bits of advice

  • Each time you advance the white die or the die of your color, you can pay 1 or more rubles to advance that same number of additional spaces.  (eg. 2 rubles gets you 2 extra spaces)
  • As an additional optional action, you can always sacrifice prestige points to get more rubles.
  • Also as an additional optional action, you can sacrifice a prestige point to re-roll the dice in any one section in the market board.

 

We hope that these tips will help you enjoy The Red Cathedral and don’t be afraid to share your own strategy tips on other platforms!  We want everyone in the community to enjoy the game as much as possible!