How to play Azul

Azul is a tile-drafting abstract by Michael Kiesling in which you claim colorful ceramic tiles from shared factory displays and arrange them on your personal wall. Each round you compete with your opponents for the colors you need, knowing that whatever you can't fit on your board costs you points.

The rules are few and the turns are swift, but the tension is real — the right tile at the right moment can accelerate your wall while leaving rivals starved of what they need. Every draft decision ripples across the table, making Azul feel surprisingly sharp beneath its elegant surface.

Never played a drafting game? The loop is this: a handful of tiles is laid out in the open, players take turns claiming some of them, and what you leave behind becomes someone else's opportunity. Azul adds one honest constraint — everything you take must fit somewhere on your own board. So each turn is really two questions at once: what do I need? and what does it hand to everyone after me? That's the whole game, and it's plenty.

What's in the box, and what each piece does at the table:

• 100 tiles (20 each of blue, yellow, red, black, and turquoise) — the azulejos themselves. They cycle from the bag onto the factories, get drafted onto your pattern lines, and finally reach your wall — the only place a tile ever scores.
• 4 player boards — your workshop, and double-sided: the colored side pre-prints which color goes where on the wall (the standard game); the gray side lets you place each tile on any free space of its row — as long as no color repeats in a row or a column — a tougher variant. Every board carries the game's four zones: the score track around the top, the five pattern lines on the left (rows of 1–5 spaces), the 5×5 wall on the right, and the floor line along the bottom.
• 9 factory displays — the round tile markets. You use 5 with 2 players, 7 with 3, and 9 with 4; each holds exactly 4 tiles at the start of a round, and whatever a drafter leaves behind slides to the center of the table, where it can still be taken.
• 4 scoring markers — one per player; each starts on space 0 and walks its owner's score track up with every wall placement and down with every floor-line penalty.
• 1 starting player marker — sits in the center each round; the first player to draft from the center takes it. It costs one floor-line space now, but buys the first pick of next round's fresh factories.
• 1 cloth bag — the tile supply. Factories refill from it every round; when it runs dry, everything collected in the box lid pours back in, so no tile ever leaves the game for long.

Azul is played over several rounds, each with the same three phases:

1. Factory offer. The starting player places the marker in the center of the table and takes the first turn; play then goes clockwise until every tile is claimed. On your turn, pick all tiles of one color from a single factory — the rest of that factory slides to the center — or pick all tiles of one color from the center. The first player to take from the center each round also takes the starting player marker onto their floor line: first pick next round, at the price of a small penalty. Then add everything you took to one pattern line, filling it from right to left. A line holds only one color, and you may not use a color that already sits on that row's wall. Any tile that doesn't fit — or that has nowhere legal to go — falls to your floor line, filling left to right (if all seven spaces are full, the surplus goes to the box lid).
2. Wall-tiling. Everyone resolves at once. Each complete pattern line moves its rightmost tile onto the matching color space of the same wall row and scores immediately: a tile with no neighbors scores 1 point; otherwise count the unbroken horizontal run it joins (the new tile included) plus the unbroken vertical run it joins (again included). The leftover tiles of completed lines go to the box lid; incomplete lines carry over to the next round. Then the floor line bites: its spaces cost −1, −1, −2, −2, −2, −3, −3 from left to right (your score never drops below 0), the fallen tiles go to the lid, and the starting player marker returns to sit in front of its new owner.
3. Prepare the next round. If nobody has completed a wall row yet, the starting player refills each factory with 4 tiles from the bag. If the bag empties, refill it with the tiles in the box lid and continue; in the rare case there still aren't enough, start the round with partly filled factories.

A round in miniature. Ana takes the 2 blue tiles from a factory (its 2 red slide to the center) and lays them on her 3-space pattern line. Beto drafts 3 red from another factory, filling his 3-line exactly. Carla is the first into the center: she takes the 2 red tiles Ana left there — plus the starting player marker, which lands on her floor line (−1 at scoring, first pick next round). Diego grabs 4 yellow, but only his 2-line can legally take that color, so two fit and two fall to his floor. At wall-tiling, Beto's red tile lands beside two vertical neighbors and one horizontal: 3 + 2 = 5 points; Diego's two floor tiles cost him −2.

The game ends right after the wall-tiling phase in which at least one player completes a horizontal row of 5 on their wall. Then everyone adds the end-game bonuses to their accumulated score: +2 for each complete horizontal row, +7 for each complete vertical column, and +10 for each color whose five wall tiles are all placed. The player with the highest total wins; ties go to the tied player with more complete horizontal rows, and if that doesn't break it, the victory is shared.

Strategically, keep your floor line as empty as possible — a few careless overflows can erase an entire round's gains. It often pays to draft a color your opponent desperately needs even if you only want one tile of it yourself, forcing them to the center and the first-player penalty. And think two rounds ahead: completing a row ends the game, so the +7 columns and +10 color sets only reward players who plan their wall early — controlling when the final round arrives is itself a weapon.