Playing board games can be a fantastic pastime especially if you tend to spend a lot of time indoors with your group of friends. With the many board games available today, picking a favourite can sometimes prove to be quite challenging. If you go for a game that’s won an award like Azul for example, then a lot of people are bound to be familiar with it. The Azul board game is a very popular board game since it won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres game of the year award in 2018, making it one of the best board games of all time. Let’s review Azul to see what made it deserve that win.
Why We Like It – Plan Games Azul Board Game
In this Plan B board game, players are tasked with putting together the most aesthetically pleasing tile pattern to decorate the walls of the Royal Palace of Evora. This is a game that can be played with family, though there’s a limit to how many participants you can have. To ensure everyone has fun at the same time, consider getting a kid board game like the Monopoly E8760000 Unicorns vs Llamas game
- Easy to understand
- Not too many rules
- Award winning game
- Players limited to 4
Performance
Plan B games has a wide selection of board games that are family friendly, and the Azul board game happens to be among the most popular of the bunch. The family game is played by 2-4 players just like catan the board game. The players compete to collect tiles and use them to tile a Portuguese tile wall. Each player is handed a player board and a scoring marker. A player continues to gain points for the patterns they create, and the game goes on until he or she has completed an entire row. At the end of it, the player with the most points wins. What is to be avoided however is collecting tiles that don’t match the tile wall. This will have you reduce your points. If you prefer a board game where you work together instead of competing against each other, you will like the Zman Games Zm7101 Pandemic game.
Design
Similar to the board game ticket to ride, the Azul board game doesn’t have very many parts to it as you’ll see in its packaging. It comes with 4 player boards, 9 “factories” (cardboard coasters where the tiles are to be picked from), different colored tiles and a scoring marker. The game is set up in such a manner that each one player has a player board & a scoring card, and at the middle, the factories are arranged with each holding up to four tiles.
Value
At the beginning, understanding how the game Azul is played can prove to be a bit challenging mainly because there’s no other specific game that is played in almost entirely the same way. Once you get the hang of it though, it can be really fun. There’s no long set of rules that you have to stick to, and this makes it possible for even young children to play and master the game. The only challenge is knowing how you’re going to pick up your tiles even when they don’t match with your tile pattern. Also, once you’ve started a row with a certain color, you can only complete that row with more of that color, so that’s something you have to figure out how to do without failing to pick one tile once it’s your turn. If you’d prefer to play a more co-operative board game however, then maybe the pandemic board game might suit your taste.
Plan Games Azul Board Game Wrap Up
Once you get the hang of it, this tile laying board game can be a very interesting game to play. All you need to be good at is strategizing, and you’ll have a decent chance at becoming a master player.
