Azul: The Most Beautiful Way to Ruin Your Friend’s Turn
Some games grab your attention with dragons, zombies, or exploding spaceships. Azul does it with beautiful tiles. Pick up one of those chunky, candy-colored pieces and you’ll understand immediately why this game is a fixture on tables around the world. This Monday at Goose Games, it’s our featured game, and we can’t wait to teach it.
Azul was designed by Michael Kiesling, and won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres in 2018 and launched a whole family of follow-ups, including Azul: Summer Pavilion, Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra, and Azul: Queen’s Garden, but the original is still the one everyone falls in love with first.
In Azul, you’re an artisan hired to decorate the walls of a royal palace with azulejos, the glazed ceramic tiles famous throughout Portugal. The theme is light, but it shapes everything about the game: you’re slowly assembling a beautiful mosaic, and by the end, your board genuinely looks like a piece of art.
How a Turn Works
The heart of Azul is a clever drafting system. At the start of each round, tiles are drawn from a bag and placed on several factory displays in the middle of the table, four tiles per display.
On your turn, you do one of two things:
- Take from a factory: pick one color and take every tile of that color from a single factory. The leftovers get pushed into the center of the table.
- Take from the center: pick one color and take every tile of that color from the center pile. The first player to do this each round also takes the first-player marker, which costs a point.
Then you place your tiles into one of your five pattern lines, rows that hold between one and five tiles. Each row can only hold one color, and you must fill it completely to use it.
Here’s the catch: any tiles you can’t fit go to your floor line, and every tile there costs you points. Taking too many tiles is just as dangerous as taking too few.
Scoring the Wall
When the tiles run out, the round ends. Each completed pattern line sends one tile over to the matching spot on your wall, and the rest are cleared away.
Every tile scores when it’s placed: one point on its own, or more if it connects to other tiles in its row and column. Building connected clusters is the key to big points.
The game ends when a player completes a horizontal row on their wall. Then come the end-game bonuses:
- +2 for each complete horizontal row
- +7 for each complete vertical column
- +10 for collecting all five tiles of a single color
Highest score wins.
Azul plays in 30 to 45 minutes and works beautifully with 2, 3, or 4 players. The rules fit on a single page, which makes it one of the best games out there for introducing new players to modern board games.
But don’t let the pretty tiles fool you. Because everyone draws from the same supply, every move is a little bit of a puzzle and a little bit of a weapon. Do you take the tiles you need, or the tiles your opponent desperately needs? Can you leave the center so loaded that the next player is forced to take seven tiles straight to the floor? Azul rewards planning, patience, and just a pinch of spite.
Join Us Monday
Come build your palace with us at 2 Row Brewing in Midvale this Monday, all night long. Grab a pint and something to eat, and see if you can master the art of the azulejo.
Azul will be on the table all night, alongside our full library of games that we’re always happy to teach. New players are always welcome!
See you Monday at Goose Games!
Sean & Jake
Goose Games SLC