First Look at Sanctum

Sanctum sees four heroes on a journey to slay the local big bad demon Lord. They’ll fight monsters (with dice), gain equipment and level up. Which sounds all very co-op dungeon crawl. So it may come as some surprise to hear that this is Czech Games Edition’s latest competitive Euro game. Indeed, it does such a good job of looking like a co-op that I didn’t realise until the end of the demo that I was supposed to be competing with people!

There are no points earned during the game until the very end so Sanctum immediately feels different to most Euros. Instead it is all about the build up. Unfortunately the demo was too short to see the end so I don’t know how the climax resolves, nor whether it was sufficiently epic. But we did get a good feel for how the game progresses.

You have a long, linear track to follow across multiple boards filled with monsters. Move along the track and you attract creatures from that board. Which is ultimately a good thing! It is only by fighting those monsters that you’ll get rewards. Either you’ll choose to gain experience, in which case you clear off the matching coloured gems from the tracks on the left of your board, or you’ll gain items on the back of those monster’s cards which can be equipped when you next return to the city. The thing is that both of these options are linked – the removed gems are a resource required to equip the equipment you find. So you need to balance both routes.

The tracks themselves also boost your stats, stamina and focus, which are used to activate the abilities on the items you equip. These abilities are central to dealing with the later monsters you’ll face. Combat is, as mentioned, a dice rolling affair, with each monster requiring a specific dice roll to defeat. The abilities on the equipment are all about mitigating these rolls. So deciding to fight requires evaluating whether you have enough equipment and resources to deal with the likely outcome of the dice roll, or whether you need to instead rest at the city for a round. But you want to be efficient with your actions, and that turns things into a more involved push your luck game. You want to do maximum damage with each combat, which encourages you to take more monsters to cover more dice values, which risks taking too much damage, or forces you to visit the city too often. You can be defeated! But that slows you down rather than eliminates you. You can see the push-your-luck Euro game lying beneath the surface everywhere.

The player interaction is similarly subtle. It’s about timing your steps along the track, drafting the monsters that fit your needs the best. Which requires you to pay attention to other players. But I have no doubt it will take a couple of games to understand the system enough to know how to best use this information, to judge who is doing better and where you might want to hate draft monsters. There is nothing so obvious as a score track to indicate these things, after all.

CGE have consistently put out unusual Euro games and Sanctum is one of the most unusual of them! The word I keep coming back to is subtle. The competitive element was subtle, player interaction was subtle the deeper strategies were subtle. But they are there. Sadly the demo was too short to see how they come together for the final act. Indeed, I left it feeling a little lukewarm on it but thinking it through for this write up has me appreciating what they are doing. But I’ll need to see a game through to the end to really judge.

---

This first impressions post was based on a one hour demo at the UKGE 2019.