In order to promote discussion on Lemmy, I'm doing micro-reviews for my favorite boardgames by genre. Please join in, provide your reviews, flame me for my terrible taste or to suggest a category for tomorrow!
Today's game is Azul. I won't be doing a best abstract game list because Azul is also my favorite abstract strategy game.
TL;DR
Score: 9/10
Positives
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Easy to teach
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Very nice tactile experience
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Interesting gameplay for both casual and heavier gamers
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Fast turns, low-ish downtime
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Drafting tiles is fun
Negatives
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You have to fill the factories with new tiles every round
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Some people like to "hate draft" (ie: take a piece that is useless to you but very useful to your opponent) and not everyone enjoys that interaction
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I wish the board was double-layered, especially the scoring part of the board. It's very easy to misplace your scoring cube by accident.
The review
Family games are very important to me. They are not the type of game I enjoy the most, but it's pretty much the only type of games my family would enjoy. I find that fantastic family weight games are hard to come by. They need to be easy to teach, simple enough my family members would enjoy and complex enough that I don't get bored to death. I think Azul nails it perfectly.
In Azul, you are a tile-laying artist and you are decorating the walls Royal Palace of Evora, in Portugal. I'm portuguese myself so naturally I imediately felt compelled to try it. You have your own personal wall that you will be decorating with differently colored wall tiles.
The premise of the game is rather simple but I don't want to go into in a great detail. Lets face it, if you're here you probably already know exactly what Azul is and how to play it.
There are several "factories" placed at the center of the table, each containing 4 wall tiles. There are 5 different wall tile color/patterns. During your turn you select a color/pattern of a specific factory and take ALL the tiles of the chosen color/pattern. The rest if tiles are placed at the center of the table, which now acts as an additional factory. The tiles you chose are placed on your personal board.
The order in which you fill your personal board is of critical importance because you get extra points by placing a tile adjacent to other tiles you placed before. Sometimes it's tempting to just pick that factory with 3 yellow tiles, but maybe you wouldn't get any adjacency bonus so it's not a great decision. This is were Azul completely nails it. The more casual folks will not give it much thought and just grab the yellow tiles and they've have a blast filling their personal board. The more experienced players will try to put the pieces in the best order in the board and have a fun min-maxing experience as well.
I feel like in Azul you have just the right amount of the randomness expected in a family-weight game and a brilliantly achieved balance on decisions vs complexity.
The pieces are very nice, it feels great to shuffle the pieces in the bag, and handling them feels great. The quality of the pieces is an important part on the enjoyment of the game. The player boards, however, could be better. Scoring is marked with a standard cube and it's very easy to accidently misplace it.
In case you are wondering, I also tried Azul: Glass of Sintra and Azul: Summer Pavilion. While the games are similar, they fail at nailing that crazy simple yet captivating gameplay original Azul has. Azul: Glass of Sintra is fine but I wouldn't recommend Summer Pavilion. Also, the "Joker tiles" mini-expansion is quite meh.
Context Information
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Number of plays: 26+, stopped logging in 2018
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Suggested player count: 2-4 players
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Average playtime: 20 mins
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Win-rate: 35%.. in 2018
Honorable mentions
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Century: Spice Road - I can't believe this game is only rank 308. Engine building at family weight? Count me iiin.
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Ticket to Ride - Europe - Can't argue with the classics. I like the Europe version in particular because it's more forgiving and you know.. I'm from europe...
The problem I have with 2 player is that it always feel pretty obvious which tiles to take to block the other player and do that pretty much all time. With 4 player you have to figure out which player is most important to block and if doing that action have the potential to screw over yourself and leave you with a lot of tiles on the floor at the end as there are more variability in how many tiles on the floor you end up with. Going first is also much more important so sacrificing potential points to go first next round is a more important choice. Most importantly the increased amount of tiles makes it really unlikely that a pile of the tiles you need the most won't come up at all, screwing you over by sheer unluckiness. All in all there are just so many more parameters to keep track of and with the increased amount of tiles reducing the luck of the draw at the start of the round and three other players likely move to keep track of and balance against your own and the increased importance of timing when to go for the first player tile makes for a much better game according to me. I find it quite easy to predict a players move in Azul compared to some other games so you will most likely have figured out what the other players will try to do, so two players feel quite predictable and luck based. 3 is a lot better but still suffers from some luck and being to predictable. Unlike many other games where the players moves feel a lot less predictable or do many more things each turn (unlike 1 thing in Azul) and I agree that the game-state will change too much in a more random way making it better at 2 or 3.