There Is No Dana...?

Released in 2017, Azul quickly rocketed up to the upper echelons of board game fandom. It was 2018's Spiel des Jahres award winner. It's the number 1 abstract game on Board Game Geek. I'd been curious to try it out, and recently got that chance.

Nominally, the game is about designing a palace wall in Portugal using decorative tiles. But they don't call it an abstract game for nothing. The veneer of flavor is paper-thin, just enough to make you wonder if this game is a lot like Sagrada. (I don't think so.)

Five colors of tiles, in multiple quantities, are scrambled in a bag. A circle of spaces is created in the center of the table, the number of spaces varying with the number of players. At the start of each round, three tiles are pulled from the bag for each space around the circle. Then a draft begins. Each player picks one of the spaces, takes all tiles of one color from there, then pushes the remaining tiles into the center of the circle. As that pile builds up, it becomes another place you can draft from -- take all the tiles of one color from the center whenever you like (but the first player to do so each round will lose a point).

As players draft tiles, they stage them on their personal game boards. You have a "row" of one tile, above a row of two, three, four, and five. Each staging row must be filled with a single tile color. Each time you draft tiles, you must add them to one of these rows -- and if you overflow, those extra tiles cost you points. At the end of each round, if a row is full, you empty it an migrate one of those tiles over into a 5 x 5 grid. There, a quilt-like design is in place, with each of the five color types represented once in each row and each column. That's where the positive scoring happens, with points for connecting to previous tiles you've played, and endgame points for finishing rows, columns, or color types.

I feel I may not be doing the best job explaining this highly visual system in words, but it's quite easy to latch onto once you see it. You spend little mental effort understanding the rules, reserving plenty for the massive strategic implications.

It is a great, fun, and quick game. A four-player game took little more than 30 minutes (even with the explanation). Basic decisions seemed easy enough to make: look at your board, figure out what you need, and go find it in the drafting circle somewhere. (It will often be there, or at least something close to it.)

But I'm sure the reason this game has grown so popular is that it doesn't have to be that simple. We were all too new at the game to think much about thwarting our opponents, but the potential for this is absolutely there. What can you draft that helps you "some" while stopping your opponent from really big plays? What do you absolutely have to draft now, and what can you risk waiting on until your next turn? (These layers do feel similar to the decisions Sagrada asks you to make, but the drafting mechanism and "building" rules feel wholly different between the two games.)

If that's still not enough strategy for you, then each player board has a back side where the patterns of your finished walls aren't fixed. You decide for yourself how to array tiles in your 5 x 5 grid (though you can't repeat within a row or column). From my skill level now, I can't imagine ever wanting that, but it's there if we start playing this game a ton.

The tiles are sturdy and fun to handle, and the art design gives it all a nice push. My only minor complaint is that some of the tile "colors" are really patterns. Everyone who sees the game for the first time wonders why two particular colors of tile are "face down," because they're completely blank when the other three types are not. A concession to accurate colors in a real palace in Portugal, I imagine. You learn fast enough, anyway.

I have a small reservation about the scoring. I mentioned that connecting to previously played tiles in your wall is important, and as a result, it feels like a player who begins to do that well might be able to run away with things, giving others little hope of catching up. But I can hardly feel certain that's the case, as little as I've played the game. And it may be that players quickly learn to watch for that sort of thing after only a game or two.

I'd give Azul an A-. It's the first Spiel des Jahres winner in a while that I felt actually delivered on the hype. It's definitely worth picking up a copy.