Review Details

Azul

Product Review (submitted on February 5, 2020):

I'm an experienced boardgamer with various tastes. And I tried this on my Game Night.

It was very simple to teach. The components and colors are pretty.

It was fun to play. Game play is simple and there is something very satisfying in arranging the tiles on your board.
Inside the simplicity shell, the game goes deep in strategy and tactics and statistics, almost chess like. Replayability of the game is how the randomized tiles show up and how you have to deal with the "Tiles" that you are dealt.

The game has two downsides for me.
1) While playing , talk on the table is minimum as you will be focusing on your board and 'sometimes on other people's boards. Each one will be doing their thing on their player board.
2) The end of the game is decided by players by making a single row of tiles out of a possible 5. So, a players can RUSH to finish the early when they take the score lead. This could be considered another strategy, however it is just ending the game short before the game reaches a stage where you can do satisfying combo scoring. This was fixed in the other versions of AZUL where they set the game length to 6 rounds; however, they also added unnecessary complexity to a nice smooth well-rounded game.