Azul (finally)

I bought Azul about a year ago, but after opening it I thought it might have too many pieces or too many rules to fit our comfort zone.  It certainly is a vibrant and gorgeous design with nice thick pieces to collect.

It's not as complicated as I thought.  Like usual, our first run through was a stripped-down version, and then I add one or two other rules each time we play again.  Azul didn't need much of that treatment.  You basically have a game board with about 8 panels and a guy marking which panel you're on.  You try to collect the glass pieces you need from the central "factory".  You can only add to one pane in a turn.  If you complete a pane, you put a piece on the track below it and score all completed panes from there to the right, then flip the pane over.  The second time, you score and remove the pane entirely.

Your marker shows your current pane, and you can only place pieces on panes from that pane to the right, never to the left of your guy.  And then you move your guy to that pane you added to.  As your full turn you can also reset your guy to the leftmost pane.

The "factory" is a set of 5 disks (5 is the count for a 2-player game, more players would get more disks), each with 4 glass pieces on them or random colors.  You can either take all pieces of one color from a disc and push the rest to the center, or take all pieces of one color from the center.  If you can't use all the pieces you took, the rest of them break and your piece moves down a penalty track so that at the end of the game you might get a -4 or -10 penalty (for clumsiness, I suppose).

That's about it.  We got comfortable enough that we felt there would be strategy to taking the pieces you need vs stopping other players from getting what they need.  I almost stuck Anne with 3 extra blue pieces she wouldn't need on the very last play of a round, but she used the next turn to reset and then I was stuck with them.  You definitely want to score panes as far left as possible so you can add all the cumulative points to the right, but there are color combinations where you really have to move to the right for a few turns just to score SOMEthing.

I'm not sure we'll be playing a lot of this, but it was a treat to unbox it and figure out where all the bits go.  I like the little tower where you discard pieces throughout the game.  They clink into there in a satisfying way.