Azul Duel Review

By Peaches and Meeples

How many ways can you make a game that takes colourful tiles and place them on a board to score? How many times can you take a simple mechanism and recycle it into new editions of a game but still actually feel fresh and original? Well Micheal Kiesling seems determined to keep testing this idea with his 5th instalment into the Azul game series (baring in mind Master Chocolatier is a re-skin of the original with additional optional rules), Azul Duel. That’s right, a great game for two players just got a two-player variant… Why? Did we need yet another duel game added to the market? Or is it this version of Azul just simply not work with more players?

What is the game about

If you know Azul games this will be all to familiar (much like the main gameplay mechanics). You are some kind of master craftsman – however, this time, instead of decorating Portugal’s royal palace, or glazing a palace with beautiful stained glass windows, designing a stunning pavilion or cultivating beautiful gardens… this time you are decorating the ceilings, thinking about how the light captures it.

Inside the master craftsman’s toolbox

Azul is not a series of games known for quality gameplay and rules writing, but usually recognised for lovely components. This game brings that sense of quality back again…well king of ISH!

The main tyles (circle shaped in this version) are again lovely to look at and hold. They feel quality, they look quality… you get a sense of care was put into them. They once again come with a nice little fabric bag to put them all in. You have the factories that feel like they are made of quality card, as well as the dome plates that you place throughout the game. The little bonus chips, are card but do what they need to do. And everything is complete with the standard Azul gorgeous visuals…….. What have we not mentioned… the player boards and tower. So, the tower, which to be fair is of similar quality to previous versions, is plenty nice and a great edition, but doesn’t fit in the box made up. This means EVERY time you put the game away, you have to deconstruct it (unless you are happy with just putting it on a shelf made up). Now this is fine, but it is a worry how long a card tower will survive putting building it and breaking it down every time you play the game. The player boards (slaps forehead really hard!!) are an unusual choice to be polite. They look lovely, but you very quickly realised when holding them they are not a great quality cardboard and they fold, so again, how long will they last folding and unfolding them? When we think back to Queens Garden, they had the two player boards you put side by side, this worked really well, why not do the same here? The folding element is just waiting for it to suffer over time. It’s a strange choice for a game series that typically has screamed quality components. Such a shame. But, that does not detract from the game, so lets see, did Michael Kiesling manage to successfully create something fresh from a repeated basic mechanic?

So it is Azul or is it something different?

The answer in short is… it is very much Azul. If you don’t know, all Azul games carry one basic mechanic across all its variants. You have a series of factories, that hold tiles that you draft and place on a board. The placement of these tiles score points, and the most points win the game. This is scaled on player count, so more players, more factories (and more chance for someone to take the tiles you need). You only take the tiles of on set (usually coloured sets, so all blue, or all red for example – although in Queens Garden they included patterns as an option as well) and the rest not taken are moved into the centre, becoming free to take. The catch is always you must always to every single matching tile, even if you don’t need them all. This leads to the ever present dopped or broken tiles which then cause negative points. It is odd to think that with four previous games Micheal Kiesling managed to create enough variation for each game to feel fresh and different… but he did. So does he manage it again?

So, with Azul duel the first new change in this version, is the limitation of being only two players. Now for a great two player game anyway, did Azul Duel need to exist? There is a debate to be had here and depends on whether you think the new mechanics for Azul Duel would work in higher player counts.

As for the new mechanics, there are a few new ones tied in with a very familiar player board style. In fact, if you have played Azul (as in the original or master chocolatier edition), the way you play tiles is very similar. The big change with the player board however is that you are not tied to a single set up. In fact, the board is constructed over the course of the game by drafting dome tiles. These are placed where you want, in what orientation you want. Some of them even include bonus slots, one type that lets you play any tile colour, and another that only gets filled once all 3 other tile slots on that dome tile are filled – this bonus is then scored based on its board position and how it lines up with the scores labelled down the board edge. You have to take two of these tiles per round, and one unlucky (or tactical player) will suffer a minus if they decide to draft a dome tile from the face down stack rather than one of the three face up options that round. Scoring as you place tiles is then very similar to the original Azul also, scoring both vertically and horizontally connected groups of tiles.

The tile drafting element of the game is where the biggest change is. You have four small factories which have the standard four tiles, and one bigger factory with five tiles. Each factory has a day and night slot, all tiles start on the day. On the small factories you also have a face down bonus chip on the night edge, and the player one token sits on the larger factory.

When drafting from a small factory, you take all the tiles with your chosen colour, that’s fairly standard, however now, rather than placing the remaining tiles into the middle, they are now stacked, in an order of your choice, on top of the bonus chip of that factory. This choice can become quite tactical, as you can end up with forcing players to take tiles you don’t want to get at the other tiles you do. On the larger factory, they are not stacked, but instead place in one of four circle outline tile slots on the night edge. As tiles are no longer in the middle, you instead can then choose to take from all night slots. To do this you take all of the top tiles from the smaller factories, and all the tiles available on the larger factory which match in colour. If you take any tiles from the larger factory night edge, you take the player one tile, giving negative points but you then get to go first next round.

Once all the tiles on the smaller factories are removed, once again revealing the bonus chip, that chip is then turned over. This now becomes another drafting option for the player. These

chips have one or two coloured halves and are placed on the side of the player board and help mark the round. Like the dome tiles, you can only take two per round. When scoring, these bonus chips can help you complete rows to score tiles (minus the single tile row). You can use two bonus chips with a matching half or three of any colour to help complete your rows. This can really help if you have three out of four tiles in a colour, the bonus chips let you clear that row, score and possibly turn the tide of the game.

To Duel, or not to Duel? That… is the question.

Well as previously mentioned, there is a debate to be had as to whether this needed to be duel game. It is clear to see that scaling could be problematic. So many aspects are very much tied to working with two players, so although it might not be impossible, it might create balancing issues or making resources unruly. Game components overall are great but that player board is a misfire and we can see a lot of people making their own for people to ‘upgrade’ their experience. New mechanics are not without quirks. When playing the game, because you MUST take two domes and two chips, and CANNOT take more that that, there has been occasions when it created a double turn (and on one occasion a triple turn) for us when playing. This has never happened in previous games, and we are not sure it was an intended feature. We probably wouldn’t recommend this as a starting point to explore the series, as it is essentially original Azul with some expanded and modified rules, but the new mechanics do add a lot of tactical choice to the game, and still really does feel like Azul. If you are fan of Azul, it is hard not to recommend this game, it is great and a fab addition to the series.

Peaches and Meeples

We are Peaches and Meeples, busy professionals who love to chill out to fun table top games. We love board games, card games, miniatures games, competitive or co-operative. Put some dice in our hands and we are in our happy place.

We are also proud guinea pig parents to two lovely fluffballs of joy.

Have you played Azul Duel yet? Tag us on Instagram and let us know what you think of the game!