How to play Azul, a pretty little tile placement game.
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Read the Rules
The aim of the game
To win, you’ll want to fill as much of your floor with tiles as possible, by filling up the left hand rows with the designs you need to place.
To set up
- Give each player a board and place a score marker on the 0 square on each.
- Put the first player tile in the centre of the table and surround it with the circular factory boards - 5 for 2 players, 7 for 3 players and 9 in a 4 player game.
- Put the coloured tiles in the bag and give it a shake.
- Finally, fill each factory board with 4 random tiles from the bag.
To play the game
Whoever most recently went to Portugal goes first.
1. Collecting tiles
They select a factory in the centre, take ALL the tiles of ONE design from it and push any remaining tiles into the middle, by the 1st player tile.
- You must take All the tiles of that design.
- You may only take 1 design, from 1 factory per turn.
Place the tiles you take in any one of the rows on your player board, filling it from right to the left.
- You may only add tiles to a row if it’s empty, or already has the same design in it.
- You may only place tiles in a single row each turn.
If you have tiles left over, don’t want to, or cannot place the tiles you took, put them in the spaces at the bottom of your player board, they are broken and will score you negative points. If all of these spaces are full, put excess broken tiles back in the box.
Now it’s the next player's turn, again they pick all the tiles of the one design, either from a factory, OR from the middle, if there’s any in there, and place them in a row on their board.
The first player to take tiles from the middle must also take the first player tile and put it in their broken tile spot. This will score them negative points, but they will go first next round.
Players take it in turns, taking tiles from the factories or the centre and placing them into rows until all the tiles are taken.
1. Placing tiles
Now it’s time to build your mosaic.
Each player goes through their rows 1 by 1 from top to bottom. If the row is full, take a tile from it and place it onto a matching spot on the same row on your player board, scoring as you go.
Each tile you place is worth 1 point, plus additional points for every touching tile in its row or column.
One you’ve placed a tile from a full row, all other tiles from that row are put back into the box. If a row isn’t complete, the tiles stay where they are.
Finally, deduct any points for broken tiles from your score, by totalling the values above each spot with a broken tile on.
After scoring:
- Return any broken tiles to the box.
- Fill each factory with 4 new tiles at random from the bag.If ever the bag runs out of tiles, fill it with tiles from the box.
- The person with the 1st player tile returns it to the middle and starts a new round.
Just bear in mind that now you cannot place tiles into a row unless there is an open space of that design in the same row of your mosaic.
Game end
Keep playing rounds until one player completes a full horizontal row on their board. Everyone finishes the placing and scoring phase for that round, remembering to account for any broken tiles and then end game scoring begins.
Score 2 bonus points for every completed row on your board, 7 points for every completed column and 10 points for each tile design you have filled all 5 spaces for.
Whoever has the most points wins!
That’s Azul, a simple, colourful, classic abstract puzzle.