A Stain in Your Game Collection

Azul is one of the bigger success stories in board gaming of the last several years. It hits the sweet spot of "simple to explain," but with "interesting strategy" to consider. It can satisfy veteran and casual gamers alike. It made the crossover to sell in mass market retailers.

So naturally, the game was going to have expansions. Spin-off stand-along games, actually. One of these is Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra.

Like Azul, the game casts players as artisans creating beautiful tile mosaics -- in this case, a stained glass window. As in Azul, there are a number of offerings in a ring at the center of the table. Each offering has four tiles in it; on your turn, you take all the tiles of one color from one offering, then push the remainder into the center. (Alternatively, you can take all the tiles of one color from the center, though there is a point penalty for the first player to do so each round.)

All that gameplay is exactly the same as the original Azul. Where Stained Glass of Sintra differs is in how the tiles you select are then placed onto a personal game board in front of you. There's more complexity in this element of the game, as you must manage a pawn that moves from left to right along several columns, until you take a turn off to reset it at the left. Tiles you draft must be placed in the column directly under your pawn, but you may move the pawn to the right (never to the left) before you place. Each column has its own specific color requirements for tiles, and an endgame scoring condition pays attention to which columns you fill in over the whole of the game.

Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra does an excellent job of creating a new game within the framework of Azul. No one would ever imagine these games weren't related, but it's very clever about how it remixes the rules into a new form. Most game collections wouldn't need both, however.

The core Azul experience is very pure and in my mind, still probably the best. But Stained Glass of Sintra is a nice variation, and may well be the preference for many gaming groups -- people who just inherently want a touch more complexity, or who liked the original Azul but got tired of it after a while. (You'd have a much harder time explaining this one to any non-gaming friends.) In my gaming circle, the arrangement is: other people own Azul (there's more than one copy in the group), while I bought Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra. We get access to both, but no one has both in their personal collection.

I think just about every good gaming collection ought to have an Azul in it. If you don't have one, I'd give Stained Glass of Sintra a B+. Perhaps that's the one for you.