The cathedral game

Show off Your Handcrafted Projects. It's Free! Start Sharing. This is a project that's been a long time coming, one of my bucket list builds in fact.

It's like a combination of Chess and Tetris. The object is to get all of your faction's buildings within the city walls and prevent your opponent from doing the same. The original game board was made of cheap pine blocks glued together and stained their respective colors and the board itself was printed MDF.

I wanted to challenge myself to carve each piece from solid blocks of contrasting woods and to make a nice board that I could pass down to my family. Some pieces were easy to knock out on the table saw, others were a build puzzle all by themselves. There are 29 pieces in all and I probably made close to 45 until I got them all right. The original box and rules were lost years ago and I wanted whomever gets this in the future to have easy access to rules that couldn't be lost and were easily read.

Unfortunately, almost all photos prior to starting the lid got lost in a computer upgrade. Hope you enjoy! An inspired suggestion came from an artistic friend that I love bouncing ideas around with. The layer of black dyed veneer between the mahogany and maple really make the letters pop and give it a nice line weight. That same friend also designed the flourish on the left. He really made this look amazing and elements of it were used in the flourish on the top.

How all my projects start, in Sketchup. I may have a tendency to outdraw my skills but my obsession with creating what's in my head usually has the latter catching up eventually. This is the earliest picture I managed to recover. All the mahogany pieces had just been finished. Making the corner caps for the board. I ended up liking them better than the original plan. Can you tell where I had another happy accident?

I realized band clamps The panel may be veneered but its substrate is a solid piece of maple so is subject to expansion and contraction. I gave it a healthy gap to expand in and only glued it at the center so it will expand equally on both sides and not shift.

The shims keep it perfectly centered while the glue dries. He was fascinated by it and saw the potential for the development of the game on the North American market. To satisfy this market in the U. Bob set up his own production, subcontracting much overflow to Brightway. The game saw a steady growth until the present day where it has been made in four locations around the world and is found online, primarily in North America, also United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, parts of Asia and of course New Zealand.

However, only one of them will be able to gain the favor of the Tsar. During the game, the players can carry out one of these three actions: assign a section of the cathedral, send resources to that section to build it, or go to the game board to achieve more resources. Each of these actions has its own mechanism and requires that the players pay close attention to what the other players are doing. When the sections of the cathedral are assigned the players take possession of the spaces in each of the columns that make up their section.

The more sections built and the completion of each with its own tower, the more points the player will be given at the end of the game. The players can send resources to the cathedral sections that they have claimed.

When they complete each of those sections they will obtain rewards in money and prestige points. They will also be able to install decorations on the completed sections to achieve even more recognition from the Tsar. This part of the game also works as a clock, since once any player completes the construction of their sixth section it brings about the end of the game.

The game board shows us the iconic rondel of The Red Cathedral. It is where the players obtain all the resource types needed to complete their work on the cathedral, as well as to get favors from the guilds and professionals to make the most of their trip to the market. In the central rondel the players choose the die they wish to use and move forward as many spaces as is shown on the top side of said die, in order to obtain the resources indicated in the space destined by the die.

The Red Cathedral is a very accessible game with regard to its rules because it is very easy to understand the various levels of the game, but it remains very interesting with regard to strategy. It is sure to please those who are more interested in the challenge offered by trying to strategically optimize their position in each game rather than the complexity of the rules.

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