Building St. Basil’s Cathedral is such a large undertaking that additional contractors have arrived to make sure that it becomes the masterpiece it was intended to be and that progress continues at a quicker pace. The best artisans and specialists are now at work and players of Red Cathedral have additional tools available to enhance their experience with this game. Player boards have a new extension to accommodate contractor pawns as well as a new black specialists’ die. There are six new building plan cards and a “Grand Duchy of Moscow” board that sits next to the Market Board. This is a new location that the Contractors can visit as a new “fourth” action option during the game to hire contractors and to collect new specialist tiles. These tiles are added to the player board on the new specialists’ die space and they create a “one time” bonus when a player rolls the new black die. After use, the tile is “collected” by the player along with other tiles that are acquired during the game. At game end, these tiles award additional game points. The other significant addition to this game is the ten new guild types. One of these guilds may be chosen each game to replace the clergy guild. Each time a new guild is chosen, there is a new type of benefit added to the market board. For example, one of the new guilds are Jewelers that help players acquire diamonds in their inventories. These are “wild” resources and any diamond can be substituted for another resource that the player does not possess. Wholesalers are another guild that allows players to use more actions in the Market each time they acquire resources. The Archivists Guild uses new contract cards that are supplied with this expansion to the game which provide benefits in exchange for recognition points. With the ability to mix new Guilds into the game, hire Contractors, and use Specialist Cards in a mix and match way, each game play gains new variety and opportunities that make Red Cathedral a better game experience. Requires core game Red Cathedral to play. For 1-4 players with 80 minutes of playing time.
The construction of St. Basil’s Cathedral is going at a steady pace. The moment has arrived to seek out the best specialists of each guild and to apply their skills and knowledge to turn this monument into something that will even surprise the Tsar himself. It’s necessary to send contractors to the far reaches of Russia to be able to stand out from the competition and achieve victory.
Contractors is the first expansion of The Red Cathedral, the hit game from Shei Santos and Isra Cendrero in which players construct Moscow’s St. Basil’s Cathedral and compete to make the most memorable contribution and win the favor of the Tsar. The expansion is also illustrated by Pedro Soto and Chema Román, two artists inspired by the work of Ivan Bilbin, the Russian artist renowned for his majestic representation of Slavic folklore in his works. The Red Cathedral stands out among recent games for its original rondel mechanism, winning the hearts of thousands of gamers around the world.
The expansion comes in a box that contains almost as much content as the original game and takes the experience into another dimension. In Contractors we find 10 new guilds that can be combined with those from the basic game, 6 additional blueprint cards, and a new card for the solo mode. Many of these new guilds use the Contractors module, which among other things, adds a new board containing a map of Russia. We Will send our contractors throughout Russia to recruit the talent of the best specialists and artisans of the country to aid in the construction of the cathedral.
As in the original game, each of these guilds contains 3 different cards, of which one per guild can be included into the game, meaning that Contractors offers 30 new different ways to play The Red Cathedral. And among other highlights are a black die that can be used alongside the 5 existing dice used to obtain resources, diamonds which serve as a wild-card form of resource, and the contractors, which are Cossack meeples that incorporate a worker placement element into the game.
I have the game Red Cathedral and wanted to add the expansion.