The board for the game of the Holy Quest was designed and developed by Matt Lorens, president of Traditio Designs, LLC and lead graphic artist for the company. The shape of the path or track around the board differs from the traditional games based on the ancient Hindu game of Pachisi. The concept is similar as there are four color-coded areas - one assigned to each player. However, the game was made into a Catholic educational and entertaining game by personalizing parts of the game. For example, Lorens took the four colors and assigned a religious order to each. Once that was done, the pawns in the game were also personalized with the saints belonging to each order. The result, is that children playing this game become saints in the game. For example, a boy can identify with St. Francis of Assisi, while a girl can identify with St. Clare of Assisi. There are enough male and female saints in the game to satisfy both boys and girls. The path players travel on the board has been changed into tiles rather than a continuous path. This allowed for assigning special actions to some of the tiles and making the game much more interesting.
The artwork for the game borrows from several years of Catholic digital photography in churches around the world. Matt has an Etsy store, TradeCatholicArt where he has been selling his artwork in the form of prayer cards, magnets and other sacramentals since 2019. Now he has accumulated enough art to be able to use it for other projects such as this game. The main board background is based on a photo of the altar of Matt's parish church in Verona, NY. Other game pieces such as the pawns and cards use a lot of stained glass imagery from Lorens' work.
Home Bases
There are four color-coded large square areas, one in each corner of the board. Each of these areas is assigned a religious order. There are also matching tiles along the game path traveled by the saint pawns on the board. Likewise, matching pawns are assigned to each of the four colors or religious orders. This way, players will know which saints belong to each of the orders. These large color squares are called Home Bases and are the starting points for each of the players. The object of the game is to get your saints from your home base into a matching area in Heaven.
Board Tiles and Action Tiles
Regular tiles without any actions.
Color coded heaven tiles are the destination for the saint pawns. The object of the game is to bring your saints into Heaven. Each player has four such tiles matching their saints in color. An exact number must be rolled to get all four of your saints to occupy these tiles. The first player to do so wins the game in the normal mode. In advanced mode, players must first get their saints onto the heaven tiles and then proceed to the throne room of God.
Each of the players has 3 Holy Ground tiles right in front of the entrance to Heaven. Whenever your saint pawns are occupying any of these tiles, they are immune to attacks of other players.
There are two color-coded start tiles for each player. Depending on the direction of play your saint pawns start on the start tile corresponding to the play direction, either clockwise or counterclockwise.
There are a total of four fast forward tiles. When a player lands on one of these tiles, they get fast forwarded to the next closest tile of the same kind. The direction of the fast forward depends on the direction of play. If the fast forward tile is the last one before your entrance into Heaven it gets ignored and is treated as a regular tile.
Cross over tiles are tricky because they can work in your favor or against you depending on where you are on the board. Sometimes they will help you advance and other times they will move you back. There are four of these tiles.
Card tiles make players pick the top card from the clues card stack. There are three sets of 10 clues shuffled in the stack so you never know what you will get. Players are required to perform any action dictated by the clue card. Some clue cards point players to pick a saint card.
Melt the ice tiles or fire tiles serve the purpose of unfreezing any of your frozen saint pawns if you have one. You can also unfreeze a saint pawn of your ally if you are in alliance with another player. There are ways to freeze a pawn of your opponents and this is one of the ways to unfreeze it by landing on a melt the ice tile. There are two melt the ice tiles on the board.
Wild tiles give the player three options. This adds an element of strategy. When a player lands on this tile, they have to decide which one of the three options to take. They can draw a clue card, they can roll two dice to advance, or they can pick any saint pawn of any opponent and return them to the home base as long as it is not a captain, it is not an ally pawn or the pawn is not on the Holy Ground.
Pick a Saint tile asks the player to pick the topmost saint card. If the saint card has never been used or if there are new players who never heard of this saint, the card is read aloud by another player or an adult and is then placed at the bottom of the saint card stack. If all players are familiar with the saint on the card or that card has been read before in this or another game, the player reading the card can ask any question based on the information on the card. For example, you can ask "What did St. Dominic receive from the Blessed Mother?" If the question is answered correctly, the player rolls the die and advances additional tiles. If the answer is wrong, player moves back four spaces.
Throne of God Area
This special area in the center of the board is reserved for the Holy Quest advanced. When the players agree before the game starts that they will play the advanced mode, a second quest begins at the end of the game. Once a player gets all of his or her saints into Heaven, only then can they begin to advance their saints into the Throne Room of God. In order to do that they enter the inner circle on the arrow tile with their color and move in the clockwise direction. They continue around until they reach the second arrow tile with their color pointing into the Throne Room. If more players are competing in this area, they can only knock their opponents back to their Heaven tiles, not their Home Base. The first player to get their saints into the throne room wins the game. In order to get in, an exact number on the die must be rolled.