Azul Review

Azul gets people to the table with its looks — those chunky, candy-glossy resin tiles — and keeps them there with a drafting puzzle so clean it feels inevitable. Then, around game three, someone dumps seven blue tiles on the table so you're forced to eat the penalty, and you discover what Azul really is.

How it plays

Tiles are laid out on circular factory displays. On your turn, take all tiles of one color from a display; the rest slide to the center, where a future player can grab them in bulk. Drafted tiles fill rows on your board, and completed rows place a tile on your mosaic wall for points — adjacency scoring rewards careful, cumulative placement.

The trap: tiles you can't place fall to your floor line for negative points. Every draft is simultaneously about what you need and what you'd be leaving behind for someone else.

What makes it shine

It's the rare game that's fully accessible to an eight-year-old and still tense between two adults who know it well. The open information means real players can hate-draft — taking tiles purely to flood a rival's floor line — and the endgame color bonuses reward long plans executed quietly.

And it's simply a beautiful object. Azul lives on coffee tables, gets played by houseguests unprompted, and survives spilled wine.

Where it stumbles

At four players the state changes so much between your turns that long-term planning dissolves; it's best at two or three. The theme is wallpaper — you're optimizing patterns, not living a story — and serial winners may eventually crave Azul's spikier sequels.

Who it's for

Couples, families, and anyone who wants one gorgeous, endlessly re-playable abstract on the shelf. If Cascadia is the calm puzzle, Azul is its competitive sibling — pick by your table's temperament, or do what we did and keep both.