Azul board game draw my attention from the first moment – it is so beautiful, color Azul tiles brings is very catchy, the game fast and exciting and we have even small amount of negative interactions. Plan B Games really know how to create a boardgame. Not surprisingly, there was so much boardgame reviews across the Internet – is is very neat design.

Today I would like to share with you some observations / strategies which I deem noteworthy when playing Azul board game. I am not claiming I am professional player in that title but after over ~25 games I can share some hints / tricks which played for me.

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So below couple of simple but crucial ideas:

  • even after couple of games of Azul, you see that it is very difficult to fill the 4th and 5th row – simply, it sometimes hard to get in one round all that tiles in one color. Thus this is not surprising, that when taking your initial tiles, it is best to take maximum: either three (arrow 2) or even four (arrow 1) – the latter never happened to me to be quite honest:

IMG_3059

  • while first point is really basic and rudimentary rule for many players, I find much less awareness among Azul players for my next proposition: try to play as much as possible with one and two tile rows in first turns – preferably have 4 of them in each row by the end of turn 4:

IMG_3060

There are to reasons for this: first, you really start to score a lot of points very quickly – see above picture from turn three – 10 points seems like a nice prize. Second, you really control the game then – you decide when it will finish or can easily react when somebody else tries to do it.

  • do not hesitate to take -1 point and be first to collect large amount of tiles from the center of the board. It is investment often worth the penalty!
  • last but not least, try to get one particular color set every turn – but not at the expense of strategy point two. Ten additional points at the end of the game is a nice bonus.

And one more thing – not a strategy but a suggestion – play the advanced version. It really gives you much more freedom and is much more interesting then basic one 🙂