Azul – The Queen's Garden

Michael Kiesling is a heavyweight in the board-game design world. Along with Wolfgang Kramer, he has been responsible for some of the great games of the last 25+ years, including Coal Baron, Porta Nigra, and one of my favourite small-box games, 2011’s Artus.

However, since 2017, he has hit a rich seam of success on his own, with the Azul series of games. All different, but all inhabiting the same abstract genre of drafting and laying tiles, in the court of King Manuel I of Portugal.

In the latest iteration – Azul: Queen's Garden -  King Manuel I is at it again – but this time he wants you, his best garden-designers, to construct something beautiful to enchant his Queen, Maria of Aragon.

And… that’s the limit of the theme… encapsulated in one paragraph at the beginning of the rule-pamphlet, some flavour-text added to an otherwise simple-to-play, difficult-to-master tile-laying game.

But who needs theme when games are this good.

If you have played any of the Azul games before then most of the concepts will be familiar to you.

The game plays over a number of rounds. There is a central scoring board, to track players’ scores, and a dial, rotated each round, indicating a new set of colour-or-pattern tiles which will score at the end of that round.

Each player has their own individual board to store and play the tiles and garden expansions they draft.

Drafting in this version of Azul is very different from previous games, and is a neat change in the mechanism. In other versions, all the tiles for the round were common knowledge, all drafted, and on display, at the beginning of a round. In Queen's Garden, four tiles are drawn and placed on top of a stack of garden expansions. The first player drafts the tile(s) they want from the four available – either all the same colour, with no pattern-repetition, OR all different colours with the same tile-pattern. They then lift the garden expansion and remaining tiles from the top of the stack and place it on the table, revealing the next garden expansion, which then has 4 tiles placed on it from the draw-bag. The 2nd player then has access to four tiles, PLUS those remaining from the original draft.

It is a nice, slow reveal and a delicious form of torture as you watch tiles you need come and go before your eyes like Will-o’-the-Wisp.

When a garden expansion clears of tiles, it is flipped to reveal a new 6-hex garden area, with a coloured-patterned tile printed in one hex, that can be drafted to a player’s personal board for placement later.

You pay to place tiles with other tiles, so you are always juggling with what is available, what you need, what storage space you have, and the cost to place the most beneficial tile.

You score at the end of each of the four rounds for individual tiles of either the required colour or pattern for each round. Then at the end of round four scoring, a final phase occurs, where you lose points for any unplaced tiles or garden expansions, and score points for groups of three or more tiles ONLY, going through each tile-colour in the game, then each tile-pattern in the game.

This is my favourite of all of the Azul games to date – it feels more strategic than the others do, and with a full player-count of four, decisions feel important. There is still a big element of luck, but it doesn’t feel to me like it swings the game too far out of reach at any time.

I was a little disappointed at the card-stock used for the player-boards – they’re a little on the thin side, for a game where the aesthetic in all other departments is A1. The tiles, as always, make the game a great tactile experience – who doesn’t like the clickety-clack of 100+ tiles in a lovely drawstring-bag, along with the challenge, on your turn, of drawing exactly four each time without looking.

If you’ve played Azul before, then you definitely won’t be disappointed, and if you’re new to the world of Azul, then Queen's Garden is a great place to start because, for me, it just beats the original into 2nd place.

P.S. there’s a great solo-variant on BGG, by BoardGameDave – you can find a rules-download here