About the contractors...

We have covered Red Cathedral 🕍 on our channel before: it is an amazing small box game in which you play as architects building towers of the Cathedral. It has an ingenious dice-rondel resource collection mechanic! 🥰 It is a well-known and beloved game for a reason, and its expansion ‘Contractors’ enhances the gameplay even further!

First of all you get a new black die 🎲 that goes on the rondel. This might not seem like much, but it does mean you have more choices when picking a die, and dice will more often share a space. The resource tile that only gives victory points is also replaced by a new one, which is a welcome change as we never wanted to go for that one. 😄 I mean, VPs win you the game but in small amounts they can feel meaningless.

Now a bigger change is a new board showing the Grand Duchy of Moscow, plus everyone gets a board extension holding their Contractors and Permits. 😮 These bring a new, fourth action you can take on your turn: sending out a Contractor to the map and claiming a Specialist tile, which lends a one-time boost to the black die.

🧐 The more meeples already on a spot of the map, the more Contracts it will cost to place a new one there. So this is a new resource you have to manage. Each tower of the Cathedral is associated with a region of the map - upon completion you get points depending on how many parts of it you built and how many meeples you have there. The Specialist tiles also add a set-collection mechanic.

That’s not all though! You get some new decks for the Influence cards too. Instead of the Clergy deck which just had means to generate points, you will randomly choose a new special one. ☝️ These have unique mechanics - like a new ‘wild’ diamond resource, a foreman meeple that walks around the construction, contract cards and many more. These introduce small but meaningful changes to the gameplay.

Now is this expansion a must-have? Maybe not, as the base game is already a really awesome and complete experience.
Is this expansion great though? Indeed it is! 😁 A great extension to a great game, adding some complexity and variability that is always welcome.