Base price: $XX.
2 players.
Play time: 30 – 45 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 3 

Full disclosure: A review copy of Azul Duel was provided by Asmodee.

And we’re back! Post-Orca Con, had a great time, but now we have a bunch of games that we’ve played and a ton of games to review, as a result! Always exciting, though, as always, I’m behind. I think there used to be years where I was ahead, but pretty much ever since I moved to the Pacific Northwest, it straight up hasn’t happened. We love to see it. But perhaps, one day, we shall return to the halcyon days of preparedness. Anyways. We’ve got an Azul to duel! Let’s check it out.

In Azul Duel, both players have been chosen by King Manuel I to decorate the roof of his palace, again! You’d really think the roof would last longer, but what can you do? Unburdened by the idea that having two different artists work at the same time might lead to aesthetic complications, he’s tasked you both to do your best. Which of you will earn his favor and claim all of Portugal for your own?

Contents

Setup

Give each player a player board and set of matching player tokens:

Set the board in the center:

Shuffle the tiles and place three face-up on the central board:

Place the score tokens on the 0 and 5 spaces on your player boards. Place the various factories near the central board:

Shuffle the Bonus Chips, set them nearby:

Set the Special Tiles nearby as well:

Shuffle the scoring tablets and place three (or four, whatever) face-up. For your first game, use the three tablets with the stars on them.

Place the tiles into the bag, then draw out four tiles for each small factory and five tiles for the large factory:

Place the start player token on the large factory:

Choose a player to start!

Gameplay

Over five rounds, you’ll place tiles and try to score points!

Each turn, you can take one of four actions, or pass:

  • Take one color from a Factory: You can take all of the tiles of one color from any of the small or large Factory tiles and add them to your board. When you do, you must place them all in one row on your player board. Any extras are placed in the Broken Tiles section of your board. You also can’t place tiles in a row if there’s a different color already there! The remaining tiles are placed in a stack on top of the Bonus Chip on the Factory.
  • Take all the top tiles of the stacks across all Factories of one color. Pick a color and take all matching tiles from the top of each Factory’s stack. Place them like you would in the previous step. If any Factory is now completely empty, reveal the Bonus Chip that was previously face-down.
  • Take a revealed Bonus Chip. Take one of the revealed ones and place it on your board on the Bonus Chip space with the current round number on it! You can place up to two.
  • Take a Dome Tile. You can place one of your player tokens on the board to claim any of the three face-up Dome Tiles on the board, or you can additionally spend 1 + X points to look at the top 1 + X tiles of the stacks and keep one. Place the rest on the bottom of the stacks in the order of your choice.

If you can’t take any more actions (which happens sometimes), you pass. Then, move on to scoring! Go from top to bottom. Each completely filled row lets you move one tile from that row onto any of the Dome Tiles in the same row. If you can’t because no matching tile exists, it stays there for later. If all three Dome Tiles are placed and you still can’t place a tile, it gets placed in the Broken Tiles section. You can place a tile of any color on a rainbow spot, but the neutral blank spots are only filled when the other spaces on the Dome Tile are filled. When you successfully place a tile, you score points! If it’s by itself, one point! If it’s connected orthogonally to any tiles, you score the contiguous vertical line (as long as it’s more than one tile) and the contiguous horizontal line (as long as it’s more than one tile). It’s Scrabble or Qwirkle scoring, if you’ve done that. The remaining tiles in the scoring row are placed into the tower.

Then, time to lose points! If you have the First Player token, you lose 2 points. Then you lose points for your broken tiles! -1 for the first one, -2 for the second one, -3 for the third one, and -4 for the fourth! That means you can lose 10 points on broken tiles, so be careful.

After doing that, reset the round and start again! You won’t draw Dome Tiles in round 5, but otherwise it all plays the same. If you run out of tiles in the bag, empty the tower back into the bag and go again. Once you’ve finished round five, also add up your Scoring Tablets and the player with the most points wins!

Player Count Differences

None! This is a two-player game, exclusively.

Strategy

  • It’s not just about what you take! It’s about when you take it. Timing is going to be a critical component of this game; it can determine how many tiles you get, for instance, or when and how you score certain things. Placing a tile in the center of two intersecting lines is worth more than placing a singleton, for instance, but also you don’t necessarily want to take as many tiles as possible. If you do, you’ll overfill a row and be forced to place the rest in the Broken Tile area.
  • Keep the scoring conditions close to your heart. Treat them like gospel; they can be worth a ton of points at the end of the game! At the very least, if you’re playing with any that cause negative or zero-scoring conditions, try to avoid those so that you can stick with positive points where possible.
  • Placement matters a lot! This is really the meat of a lot of Azul games; where you place determines how you earn a lot of points. This isn’t just because of the Scoring Tablets’ conditions, but also because of the Scrabble / Qwirkle row-and-column scoring if tiles are adjacent to one or more other tiles. You can earn a ton of points if you keep building gradually, but you want to build vertically and horizontally, if possible, to maximize your score.
  • You can, if you’d like, try playing a bit mean and playing to mess with your opponent. Try seeing what they want, for instance, and setting up a stack of tiles when you drain a factory so that if they take the color they want, they’re forced to take extra tiles they can’t use. You can use that to cost them points. You can also take the tiles they need, but I recommend doing that exclusively if it junks up their 4 / 5 / 6 rows, since those take the most tiles to fill (and take the longest amount of time, so leaving them open sucks).
  • The bottom rows are going to be explicitly harder to fill up, since they require more tiles. Like I said, they’re larger rows so placing their tiles is going to take longer, since you need more tiles to fill them up. It’s not impossible, certainly, but depending on the distribution of tiles you might end up with a round where there just aren’t enough tiles to do what you need.
  • Bonus chips are generally handy! You can use two matching chips or any three chips to replace a tile in a row you’re missing, provided there’s at least one tile of that color there. No luck with filling in the first row, but if your opponent leaves you one short you can usually cover yourself with these, so that’s nice.
  • You don’t have to place tiles if you’d rather not. It’s not great to take just one tile to your 6-row at the end of a round, for instance. If you’d rather not take that tile, you can just choose to break it. Sometimes that’s nice, since it frees you up for the next round, but it is negative points, so factor that in.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

  • The tiles are nice! If the original Azul was Starbursts, I suppose these are Sprees? I’m not sure, candy-wise, but they have a great weight and component quality to them. They were the highlight of the original game, too, so that’s nice. I like the patterns, as well.
  • I like the stacking that you do when you take tokens from a factory. One thing that felt inelegant to me about the original Azul was that you routinely just dumped all the tiles left on a factory into the center, so you ended up with a pile of tiles at some point. It’s fine, but I like stacking them on the Bonus Chip. It lets you assert some strategy and potentially save tiles for yourself for later, which is nice.
  • In general, the blue / gold aesthetic is quite nice. I like the blues in this game a lot (I’m neutral on cyan, though), but I think the contrast between the two and the moon motifs all make the game look very nice. Art is always a strong suit with the Azul series.
  • It’s a little more complex than Azul, in a few ways that I like. There’s a bit more planning and strategizing you can do, especially around which actions you take when to try and force your opponent to take things that they don’t want or to leave things for your later self. I find those aspects interesting.
  • I really enjoy the variable endgame scoring. I think this is a real highlight, though I’d love to see more options. It lets you prioritize different things which can really change up gameplay (or, if I were better at the game, I’d be taking those more into account, whoops).
  • The Special and Joker plates are pretty fun, as two options. They reward different behaviors and present different ways to go after completing the tile, which is nice, and having a wild option is pretty helpful when filling things out.

Mehs

  • I wish the box were large enough to fit the tower. The box is smaller and narrower than a standard Azul box, if you’re wondering, but it comes with that tower and the tower does not lay flat in the box when broken down. You’ll need to fold the bottom flap backwards so that you have room to place it, which is also odd.
  • Some box organization would have been nice, too. The tiles just kind of go everywhere, which is a shame. I’ll add another bag later, I suppose.

Cons

  • It’s a bit baffling how nice some of the components are compared to others. Particularly, the player boards are not great, in that they’re essentially cardstock compared to the really quite nice tiles. Means you’re lucky if they don’t arrive a little warped and you need to flatten them. They’re also folded, which is odd; I’d have much rather had the two pieces separate than one long folded piece that I now have to counter-fold so that it will lay flat. A lot of the game revolves around the three boards, and they’re pretty low-quality, which is a shame.

Overall: 7.5 / 10

Overall, I think Azul Duel is a solid two-player alternative to the classic Azul! For me, it feels almost like a full iteration on the game and cleans up some things I didn’t love about the original. I don’t miss playing two-player Azul when I play this, to be real. I like that there’s more interaction and that the timing of what you take and what you play when matters. It’s also much easier to play strategically or rudely by being able to take things your opponent clearly wants or stack tiles in a way that complicates your opponent’s plays. You even get Bonus Chips to make the rest of the game work for you and compensate for missed opportunities. Granted, some of those things are the same as base Azul, but it forms a nice and cohesive experience! One thing that I’m less sure on is whether or not you, dear reader, would be able to pick up and play this without any Azul experience. The challenge here is that since I already have Azul experience, it’s tempting to say “absolutely, you can play this without any experience with the standard Azul game”. Unknown unknowns and all that; we don’t know what we don’t know. I’m more inclined to say that standard Azul is going to be less complicated to pick up from jump. If you’re looking for a slightly more complex experience, however, you can likely start here and see if you want to jump into the Azul family of games if you tend to play more two-player games. I would have liked to have seen better components outside of the tiles, here, as well: the tower is pretty disappointing, and the player boards are not particularly great. I’d have loved if they had all even been punchboard or something just to elevate it. But oh well. The full verdict is that I’m a fan of Azul Duel, however, and if you’re looking for an interesting two-player interpretation, you like great tiles, or you just want some spatial strategy in your life, I’d definitely recommend checking it out!

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