Squirrel

So Azul is an abstract strategy where you’re placing tiles to complete rows on your personal player board in order to move it to your finished wall and score points. You score points by counting orthogonal connections to the tile you just place. The game play is simple, you take a color (all of that color) from any factory you choose (these are small circular coasters) and the remainder of the tiles go to the middle of the factory floor (aka your table). Then you place the tiles you just took to your preparation area of your player board. At the end of the round (once all the times available have been taken) you move the right most tile from any completed row in your preparation area to the finished wall on the right side of your player board and score it appropriately.

The rules are simple, the game is beautiful, and the replay is fantastic. The components consist of slick plastic tiles of various decorations, a decent quality player board, a nice bag to draw the tiles from, some card board coasters to represent factories, and some small cubes to track your scoring. All the components are of nice quality and visually add to the overall look of you decorating a wall in the Royal Palace of Evora.

I highly recommend this game, even if you don’t consider yourself an abstract strategy gamer. I also recently played it with a new gamer, when I asked what type games he likes, he said Uno and Checkers. So naturally I picked Azul as something to introduce him to since it’s anabstract strategy like checkers (yeah it was a long shot since they play nothing alike). Anyway, he LOVEDit and we played about 5 plays in 2 days!

This is one of those easy to learn but hard to master kind of games. Basically you and the other players are spirits living happily when the “evil” invaders come and try to take over the perfect island. They explore, build towns and cities and create decay all over the pristine land. Your job, as the spirit, is to rid the island of these invaders as quickly and efficiently as possible. This isn’t an easy task though. You’ll use every tool at your disposal (lightning, wind, water attacks, fear, and even the island natives).

The replay value of this game is through the roof with the custom powers, different spirits, varying difficulty levels and scenarios. It is a difficult game to win though, so teamwork is essential.

Good luck on your victory.

This is my wife’s favorite game to play when we are relaxing with a game in the evening. We’ve played most of the schemes at this point and it always feels engaging and fun. I’ve only played it with two people at this point.

The cards are good quality, the box comes with dividers to make setup easier, and the variety of villains and schemes keeps the game fresh. There are also many expansions for this that are available but I’ve only bought one so far.

This was one of the first games my wife really got into. It’s also the first deck builder we tried. We’ve since tried other deck builders but this one remains her favorite. Mostly because of the variety of play and the familiarity of the characters.

All in all, this is a solid deck builder and is an easy game to introduce to a new gamer.