Azul - Upgrade Your Game!
Azul is one of the first full-size board games that I introduced my kids to. It’s very approachable, with a good depth of strategy. Its also just the right length – we can finish a game in 30 to 45 minutes, especially now that we have played it several times.
Players take turns choosing tiles from available “factories” shared in the center of the table. Once all of the tiles are taken over several turns, the round is over and each player scores based on what tiles were added to the board. Extra tiles that you couldn’t use count for points against you. Play continues until at least one player has an entire row of tiles completed. You score some additional bonus points for completing sets, and then the game is over.
Azul is a great game on its own, but we found several ways to upgrade your game as we played. Here’s the 4 things you can add to Azul to make it more enjoyable to play.
#4 – Turntable or Lazy Susan
We took this idea for a spin, and it certainly makes tiles more accessible if you have a large table or players with short arms. However, it takes a pretty large turntable to hold all 9 factories for 4 players. Also, be careful if you have energetic players…
You could certainly make a custom lazy susan with recesses for each of the factories and tiles, but it’s not so much of a game changer. Sometimes we use one, sometimes we don’t.
#3 – Score tracker
A common way to keep score is with a marker on a track, and for some games its not too big of a deal as the scorekeeper is separate and away from the playing area so it rarely gets bumped. For Azul, the scorekeeping is on the player mat, and we often found it easy to bump your player mat or the score token. Azul is hard to recount score on since it is based on when each tile is played, not just what tiles are played. We found this was a good time to use a magnetic score counter. We’ve played enough that scores exceed 100 points, but generally only on the final scoring and not by much. Using a magnetic counter prevents an accidental bump from ruining the game, and everyone still has their own scores to keep track of. Not to mention, once you have a set of score trackers, you can use them with a wide variety of games – not just Azul.
#2 – Player Mat Overlays
While bumping the score track can be a game-ender, it’s basically guaranteed that you’ll bump the tiles around. Thankfully, in the base version, the tiles all have a fixed location so it can be easy to set them back where they belong. However, there is an actual game expansion that comes with some variant player mats (to shake up the strategy a bit) as well as player board overlays. Azul: Crystal Mosaic looks to be around $15 MSRP. The overlays include a portion to keep the scoring token from getting bumped, so this also helps with score tracking. The extra benefit of some fun variant player boards is also well worth it. Also makes for quick cleanup as the trays dump pretty well back into the bag.
#1 – A second bag
The game comes with a cloth bag for the tiles, and at the start of each round you pull tiles from the bag to fill the factories in the center. When tiles are discarded from player mats, they go into a discard pile. Eventually, the bag runs out and you add the discards back to the bag as a new supply. This added a lot of time to the game, as when you get close to the end of the game, you are refilling the supply bag every round. The biggest improvement was to add a second bag. As you discard tiles, put them directly in the second bag. When the first bag runs out, switch bags and your discard bag becomes your supply, and the now empty bag becomes your discard bag. It may not seem like much, but it made a huge improvement in the flow of the game. We just used a cloth drawstring bag we had sitting around. It doesn’t have to be anything super specialized.