Azul, Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra, and Azul: Summer Pavilion: You Want these in your Closet

    We’ve made it through more than a year of pandemic, and so far, our game storage has been (almost) as important as our TP stash. Games have given us something to figure out, to laugh about, to look forward to, and to make the hours pass fast. In short, they’ve helped us stay sane. Over the course of this past year, we’ve pulled out rarely played games, old favorites, and we’ve bought a few new ones, too. But if you were to ask which ones have come out of the closet the most, the answer would be the Azuls. There are currently three of them: Azul, Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra and Azul: Summer Pavilion. (And I hope there are more to come.)

    The basic mechanic for each game is the same. Tiles are placed on cardboard rounds called “factory displays,” and then players take turns choosing what they want, until all the tiles are gone. What happens to the tiles after they’ve been taken is where the games diverge. Each version has its own way of placing the tiles on player boards and of earning points. The games are all standalones, which means that you can play any one of them without having played the others.

    So why are these the games we’ve played the most?

        · They’re fast to set up and quick to play.
         

        · They don’t require a lot of heavy strategizing, which means they’re easy on pandemic-fried brains.

        · There’s something about the solidness of the tiles and the patterns you make when you place them that is oddly soothing.

        · These games are just . . . fun.

    We’re not out of the pandemic woods yet. Who knows how much longer it will last? Thank heavens we have our Azuls. If you don’t have any, you might want to get some, too.

# Players . . . 2-4
Ages 8 and up
Game time . . . . . . . . 30-45 minutes

Set up . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 minutes

Luck   . . . . . . . .5 .  . . . Strategy 

*Interplay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Visual Appeal . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Component Quality . .. . . . . 9

*Replayability . . . . . . . . . . . 9

*See "How we Rate" for a definition.