Fit for a Queen

I've written previously in praise of the board game Azul. But when a board game is as successful as Azul -- retaining the love of gamers while appealing to a wider audience -- there's no way its stopping at just one product.

Azul is not the sort of experience that easily lends itself to expansions, so instead it gets spin-offs. I've blogged (positively) about one of those, Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra. Recently, I've had the chance to play another, Azul: Queen's Garden.

Queen's Garden is really something quite different. Without the Azul branding on it, I doubt I would have been likely to compare it to the original game. It's hard to say whether designer Michael Kiesling was always planning this as an Azul (while wanting to do something new and different), or created this game independently and then used the name of one of his most successful games to help sell this one. Either way, I respect the departure.

There are superficial similarities to Azul. There are tiles you pull from a bag, which are then drafted by players. Drafted tiles temporarily go in a personal "holding area" of sorts, until they are placed on to an individual game board the player is building up. And the first player to pass in each round loses 1 point and goes first in the next round. But to my mind, that's all Queen's Garden has in common with Azul.

The way the tile drafting pool works is different. Instead of all options for the round being visible from the start, a round of Queen's Garden begins with limited choices, ultimately balloons to a much wider array, and then contracts again.

The tiles themselves are different. The ones pulled from the bag now have two characteristics instead of one -- not only a color (as past Azul games had), but a symbol indicating their cost/value. They're hex-shaped instead of square, affecting the patterns you can make. And you place them in spaces on other, larger cardboard tiles that you also have to draft.

Scoring is different. You have more flexibility in the patterns you can make on your board. More expensive tiles get very much harder to play, but can be worth very many more points over the course of the game. There's also a quite brutal penalty for unused tiles at the end of the game, which forces you to plan well ahead to make sure you don't get bit.

I might argue that there's another, even surer sign that Azul and Azul: Queen's Garden are quite different games. I'm not especially good at Azul. I enjoy playing it, though I generally lose to people who navigate its particular spatial puzzle more effortlessly than I. But so far, at least, my record at Azul: Queen's Garden is quite good. It's still a spatial puzzle, but apparently it's sufficiently different that I engage with it in a different way.

Of course... it's easier to reflexively love a game you happen to be good at, so I'll understand the skepticism you might have when I say that I really love Azul: Queen's Garden. So let me perhaps temper that by saying that Queen's Garden is a far less elegant game than its forebear. Despite a short rulebook, it feels much more difficult to wrap your head around at first. I'd say it does not have the crossover potential of the original Azul; I would try Azul out on very casual gamers, but I'd absolutely keep Azul: Queen's Garden on the shelf among such a crowd.

But I think all that just means that there's room for both in many gamers' collection. I give Azul: Queen's Garden an A-.