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Tag: Azul

*** Azul (2017) – Michael Kiesling

It’s Azul time.  Everyone else has reviewed it, so why shouldn’t I?  Azul is a light-weight abstract for 2-4 players with an appetizing presentation.  Everybody says the same thing when they see its colorful resin tiles seductively radiating from the gaming table for the first time: “They look like Starburst.”  This would be annoying if it wasn’t 100% true.  I also really like the material used for the cloth bag you draw them from.  It’s pleasantly cool to the touch and doesn’t use any of those awful synthetic fabrics found in other games (*cough* Orléans).  I’ve put my hands in lots of bags for lots of games — this is one of the best.  Really, everything about the game’s production is top-notch — besides an ever so slight warping issue with the player boards (as cardboard tiles of this size and thickness often have).  Typically, I don’t even bother mentioning such details in my reviews, as component quality almost never influences my opinion on a game, but I do mention them here for one very simple reason: Azul is a gaming meal that looks much better to me than it tastes. Azul is a basic set collection game with rules that make it seem much more complicated than it actually is.  Though some of its elements were hard for me to picture when reading through the rulebook, within two seconds of seeing them in action I understood their how and why.  This is a rather unintuitive design that is hard to explain with…