Azul Full Playthrough - JonGetsGames

welcome to John gates games today I'll be doing a full 3 player playthrough of Azul in this game players will be trying to fill in a grid of these beautiful tiles and they'll be grabbing these from several locations out in the middle of the table and every time they do take a certain color tiles all of the different color ones will be pushed into the middle and it will create an incentivized pile where other players can go in and grab a the tiles that they want from that once you actually get these tiles onto your board you can put them into this grid and score a variety of points based on there are Jason C's and you'll try to do large combinations in order to get the most points that you can I'll explain how the game goes in more detail while we're actually playing it so let's jump in here is our 3 player game fully setup and ready to play we're gonna play from the perspective of the central player board right here and they'll have any left and right opponent and down here we have seven of these factory coasters each of which has four random tiles on them and it's worth mentioning that if this was a four player game we'd have two more of these coasters in play and it's worth noting that each of us are going after the same pattern of towels on our player boards but there is a variant on the back side of the boards that you can kind of mix up what you're gonna be doing but for this playthrough I'm gonna stick with the base rules we will be the start player and normally I would jump right into the first turn at this point but I think I'd like to explain specifically how the scoring works first and it'll make the actual process of grabbing tiles and putting them onto our boards make it a lot more sense here's an example of what our board might look like when going into the scoring for the second turn of the game now we have some tiles over here on the grid already and a bunch of tiles in these rows and we only start with the top row if there are tiles in every single slot in the row then we get to place at the right hand most tile over here onto the grid in the matching row and it also has to match the color so we could place this red tile down right here and if it has no orthogonal adjacent tiles then you just get one point and move on so with the second row it is full so we can take at the right hand most one and when we place it right here we see that there are still no horizontally adjacent tiles but we do have a vertically adjacent tile and this means that we get to score the vertical we're gonna get one point for every tile in it so that is a two point score for that and we can move on now to this blue row we see that we have three here so it's full we take the right hand most one and when we place it right here it now has some vertically adjacent tiles and horizontally adjacent tiles so get to score both of those that means we're gonna get one two points for the horizon and during any get one two three for the vertical that means that is a five point placement we can move down here and we see that both this fourth and fifth row are not actually complete so we leave these tiles here and these tiles are gonna get thrown back into the box and that sums up scoring place tiles with all that scoring in mind let's go ahead and jump into our first turn and it turns out really simple all we're gonna do is grab all of a single colored tile from either one of these factories or from any tiles that are here in the middle but there are any tiles just there yet so that means we have to pick from any of these on the outside that means we can come over here and just grab this one teal one or we could come over here and grab all three of these yellows and I think that sounds like fun let's go ahead and do that for our first turn when we grab these we now have to place them down into one of the areas on our player board we have a bunch of options actually available to us the restrictions that we have to play with are that all these tiles have to go into the same row and if there are already tiles on that row you have to match at that same color the last thing is if for instance there was already a yellow on that spot up there you are never allowed to put a yellow tile right here because you can never score it again so now looking out here we actually could put this right here if we wanted to but the problem is that there are no other spots for these last two tiles that means that they're gonna fall all the way down here onto the floor and as you could see during scoring this tiles worth negative one points and this tiles worth negative one points so that is certainly not good for us I don't think we want to do that for our first turn I think it's relatively simple we can just place them all right there and that means that we will score this tile right here over onto this spot on our board during the first going around and at this point with a blank open pattern like this I don't think there's anything in particular we're gunning for we're just looking for good grabs to try and insert placing tiles down as quickly as we can at this point the last thing we have to do is to grab any tiles on the factory that we chose from that we're not actually part of the color and push them into the middle that means that as the game goes on more these tiles are kind of shift into here and the first person to take two miles from this area is gonna grab it this token which means that they will be the start player for the next round but this token also goes down here onto the floor scoring them potentially several negative points with all that done play now goes to the right hand player and they have decided they want to grab at this yellow tile right here that means that these are gonna get pushed into the factory either gonna place this up here into there one spot it's now the left players turn and they want to grab it these two teal tiles but you're gonna push these into the center so that there are a lot more options formatting in here and they're gonna place these over into the third row slot you'll see that they're actually leaving one slot open actually they decide to go down into the four slot leaving two spaces open that they are hoping to fill later on in the round but as you can see there's still one two three four of these teal tiles out that they have the potential to grab it's now come back to us and there are a few things for us to think about we know that we're gonna be scoring these yellows on this round which means it'll get placed right there and that means that if we were able to get two Reds on this round as well we would both place that on this round and then when we score the yellows we would get more points for it realistically we're gonna try to chain up as many of these tiles next to each other to score as many points as possible on there are some other ways to score as well in fact let's go ahead and talk about those real quick these three things are all of the endgame scoring options we'll get seven points for every vertical column that is completed we'll get two points for every horizontal row that we complete and we'll get ten points for every set of five of the exact same color that is out on our board so with all this in mind red does look attractive but the problem is that all of these Reds are split up we could of course grab this one which seems like a terrible idea because we would get to be first player which is nice it gives you first dibs at grabbing tiles from the factories but it also means we would lose points um and I think that another option for us is with this yellow here there's a blue underneath it there are four slots and there are one two three four five six of these blue tiles still out so they are much easier to grab and well it we could grab these two right here and put them right there we would take this which means we start player which is nice and realistically we figure we're probably not going to be breaking any other tiles on this turn or at least we're hoping we won't and only losing a point is not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things scores can vary from the 40s and 50s all the way up to the 90s depending on the length of the game so maybe we should just do that in fact I think let's go ahead and do it well it's the second turn of the game we're gonna grab that starting player token and we're I'm gonna take these two blues I've talked myself into of course the other thing I could have done is try to grab something else from one of these factories and have that extra blue fall here into the middle but then the odds are much greater that one of our opponents would have grabbed them in fact looking over here we could see that the right hand player would very much have liked to grab those two Blues themselves because that would go right underneath the yellow tile here so we really do need to pay attention not only do what we want to do but also to what our opponents want to do we don't want to set them up with something really nice and now you'll notice that with the one gone there is no negative reason to grab from this central area although of course starting going first is good and so as this fills up there's gonna be even more of us jumping in to grab the opportunities that are here so with that it now goes over to the right player they decided to grab this blue tile here and they're gonna put it right over here who they're only grabbing single tiles right now we'll see if that works out well for them and then all of these are gonna spill into the middle but the left players turn they really want to grab it these black tiles and place them down here because black would go underneath the teal that they are hoping to score but they are also worried if they don't grab it these two right now it's possible that they might not be able to make this work we might be grabbing some of them especially us we haven't taken anything from the easy slots on our board just yet and they have decided it probably makes more sense for them to just to lock this in with a single turn so they'll definitely score those Till's and worry about what they're gonna do on the next turn when they gets to them so now it is our turn considering it looks like we're trying to make a little score chain happen here with this fourth column and we are definitely incentivized to try and grab more of these blue tiles and more of these red tiles and it's possible we could try to do both at the same time let's go ahead and grab it this blue tile right here it'll add right over there so we just need one more and there are two different options so we're hoping that both of our opponents don't grab them on their turn although it is a little risky because over here we see that the right hand player just needs one more blue so it's very likely they're gonna do that but with this than all of these tiles are going to fall down in here in fact actually hold on now that I think about it if the right hand player does that that means another red is gonna get pulled down in the middle and then we wouldn't be able to grab the two Reds we want we might actually want to rethink this turn it's obviously a tough call at this point because well there are so many these Reds out we could grab one of them and it would bring a blue day in here at the red would go up there and we'd only need one more to match that up and if we don't end up scoring this fourth row it's not that big of a deal but the flip side is if we'd go hard on the blue it is very likely the right hand player does grab it and the left hand player might see that I really need one more blue and it would be the last one out there and they have not filled in their top slot yet so maybe we shouldn't make ourselves in a vulnerable position like that by kind of playing into something that might actually happen to us let's instead take one of the Reds and I figure it will grab this one right here that's gonna dump all of this stuff into here and it's possible that the right hand player does not grab this blue and the teal player does something else to collect two of these blues together so that we can plug both of them down this might be a bad move but let's go ahead and stick with it for the right players turn they just can't pass up all five of these blacks they're gonna put them down here which is going to finish out that row for them which is pretty good although it's only gonna score them one point down here but it's much harder to actually fill in these tiles and they wanted to jump at the opportunity it's now the left players turn and they decide they're actually gonna take this one red and put it up there which brings it back to us we really I think want to try and go for that red I guess nothing really happened with the Blues on this round it's still just as incentive eyes actually if we go for a blue and now the right hand player might do it but the left hand player most likely won't so let's actually not take a red let's grab this blue do something similar to what we're gonna do last turn and I think that worked out pretty well for us with that it's now the right hand players turn and they are gonna grab it this blue finishing theirs out so that goes over there it's not the left hand players turn and unfortunately for us they have looked at all their options and decided that there's nothing amazing for them to do so instead they're gonna grab at this blue tile right here and place it onto this row it's gonna kind of work towards the column that they're trying to build it with these teals and more importantly all of these grabs were okay for them but this one they knew is really going to get in our way and it's gonna stop us from scoring this line so that definitely slows us down of course the moment that tiles taken all of this is going to get pushed into the middle so everybody is going to be drafting from this and in fact we're going to keep going around and around until every single time it's taken even if that means we have to take tiles and put them right onto the floor if we have known illegal places to place them but there's probably not gonna be too much of that going on in the first couple rounds of the game so it does come back to us and actually now that I look at our options maybe there will be some tiles on the floor because not only did taking that blue tile really hurt us for not letting us score this it means that in order to grab a red tile we're gonna have to take both of them and one will go there and one will fall down to the floor and that means that we'll lose a point but the alternative is us not doing that somebody taking these Reds and that means we not only don't score this but the tile also remains on our board which is going to potentially block things up for the next turn so I think unfortunately that means that we are going to have to take both of these tiles one of them crashes to the floor and the other one goes right up here that was a really good blocking move by the left hand player over there so and now it goes over to the right player they like the look of these two teal tiles they'll put them right there they're not gonna be able to score them in this round but it is kind of in line with the yellow and the blue that they'll be scoring in this round so they're trying to set themselves up really well for the next turn it's now come back to the left hand player and they don't have any options to really mess us over this time this they're just gonna grab it these two black tiles place them right over there which means it now comes back to our turn we just have this one yellow tile and we could either put it down here on the five slot or we could put it up here in the single slot and I figured there's really no reason for us not to do that and with that we have finished the action phase of the round and a we can all now all simultaneously score our tableaus but I'll go ahead and do them in order so you can see how they go on screen at least for this first turn as I explained at the beginning of the video we're gonna start at the top row and since we have all of the tiles in that set at just one we can go ahead and place it right here and that's gonna score us one point coming down here we now have this row filled up so we can put the red right over here that's also gonna get us a point on this third row we have all of those so we can bring this over here and just like I mentioned before as long as you have adjacent on tiles on the orthogonal e you're gonna score either the vertical or horizontal based on where those adjacent tiles are so we just have the vertical here so that's gonna be a two-point score when we place this yellow tile here that brings us up to four points and that is at the end of our positive point score because of course we weren't able to finish out this row and then we look down here we're gonna lose two points for these two towns right here so that means at the end of the first turn of the game we only made two points unfortunately and now we're gonna take all of the tiles that are on the floor as well as all of the tiles that were in the various rows that were completed and we're gonna throw them into the lid of the box looking over here at the right hand player they are gonna score this yellow tile for one point then they're gonna score this blue one right here which is gonna get them two points bringing them up to three and then down here they're gonna get score this black tile which is gonna be one more point so they got four points total for this round since they have no negatives and again we can put all of these tiles into the lid of the box and this is important because once we go through the entire draw bag we're gonna grab it these tiles and refill that bag with them lastly we have the pesky left hand player they're gonna score one point for this red then they're gonna get one point for this black tile right there they are not gonna build a score this blue tile yet and they're gonna get one point for this teal going just like that and they can now throw these away and with that all of the scoring's are done it looks like we actually did the worst out of all of our opponents at just getting two points but there's no worries we're gonna score lots of points as at these grids get filled up with all scoring done it's now time to check for the endgame condition if any of us had completed one a full horizontal row of tiles then the game would end right now and we would score up all these endgame points but that has not happened obviously it's gonna take at least five turns for that to be a thing so we can now move into the next turn will be the start player we could take this token and put it into the middle and now we're gonna take out this beautiful draw bag right here and we're gonna pull four tiles from it for each of these factory locations we are they starting player and now that we are going into the second turn and we actually have us some tiles out here on our board this is definitely gonna modify some of the things that we are looking at into these factories and certain things will be really good for us and maybe not so great for our opponents and in particular we know that by the end of this round we want to have picked up at least one blue tile and put it right there and looking out at all the factories that there are five of those blue tiles out total so it is one potential thing we could do is come down here and just grab the single one and put it right there because the rest of the blue tiles are paired up with another blue tile and of course if we grab a pair of these or worse if there were three of them together that means we're gonna get more and more negative points so this is actually a really attractive play just grabbing this single blue one but we have another really good play and that is grabbing all three of these red tiles because if we place them right along here we would place it there and is gonna be adjacent to this one that we already played so we would get some bonus points for it in addition to that there are one two three four of these black tiles out and if we were able to get two black tiles here and then three Reds that means we would score the black tile and then the red one would actually score on the vertical one as well as a horizontal and that's where you can get lots of points by kind of nesting all these together now unfortunately these both seem like really appealing things for us to do but we also look over here and we can see that the right-hand player could use just a single blue they could Punk it down right there they'll be pretty decent for them they get two points for it and I think I've actually talked myself into it we're just gonna grab this single blue as our starting move and it's very attractive to grab these three Reds but I think this is probably the safer move for us it's now the right hand players turn and they decide to grab both of these yellow tiles right here which means there's actually a cluster of three Reds in the central area so there are two ways to go ahead and grab that so we're someone happy to see that happen and they're gonna grab both of these and put them into their to row for the left hand players turn it looks like they are on a similar mindset to us and trying to finish off their blues early and they're gonna grab it these two right here bringing the red and then the black in there's four red here in the middle now which is a much less interesting to us but we're still happy because this is available to us and these are gonna get plunked right over there and I think now that has come back to us and this option is still available to us there's not a whole lot of thinking we really need to do right now let's just go ahead and grab all three of these we're happy we're able to do both the things we wanted to do on these first two turns we can plug those down right there and now the right player gets to go they have decided that they liked the look of this single red right here they're gonna plunk it down just like that it means that they're gonna score the red and the yellow which is gonna be quite a bit of bounce around points for them oops I just notice that this black tile should have been in the middle but that would not have changed the right-hand players decision they they like the red tile and with that it now goes over to the left player they've decided they are sick of going last in turn order so they're gonna go ahead and grab from the middle they're gonna take this first player token and they're gonna grab these two yellows right here of course they thought about grabbing all four of these reds those would go down here but they would not be particularly close to another scoring tile at this point I guess if they got a block in the future that would do really well for them but you score more points if you kind of build it tiles adjacent to each other as opposed to building them not adjacent to each other and then filling in the hole instead they like the look of these yellow tiles because they'll place those right there and that will actually go over here and score off the red tile in fact those yellow tiles are even more important for the left-hand player because it means when they score the blue tiles they're gonna score up all the way to this red as opposed to just doing this teal tile down here well it's now come back to me and there are some really good options available to us first of all we have these two black tiles which we could put right there which would go up there and it means that when we put the red there we would score off the black as well but we also have these three teal tiles we could put them down here and if we were able to pick up these two out of the three other teal tiles in this turn that means that we would be scoring even longer on this vertical right here but I think between the two doing little combining of the horizontal and vertical scoring is probably actually better for us and I don't think these four Reds look interesting at all to us we could put them down here but there's no way we can finish it out because these are the last four Reds in this round and well we couldn't even put it into the two slot because there's already a red here and going into the one slot would be a terrible idea so I have talked myself into grabbing these two black tiles I suppose we can so grab these ones it would mean that this steel would drop down over here and we don't want that because that would put four Till's into the middle and the right hand player would love for Till's all at once because that would be adjacent to a tile they've already grabbed so let's go ahead and stick with these two black tiles coming over to the right-hand player it looks like they still had a pretty good play with these teal tiles if there were four of them they would have been happy but even with these three they are still pretty happy with it because they can place them right there and it'll score along with both of these tiles that they've already done in fact maybe they actually liked the three tiles more than the four tiles but oh well we've already committed to it that's the term they took and it now goes over to the left-hand player but left players turn even though these are four Reds don't sync up perfectly with the scoring in a row with the till when they already have they decide it's better than the other options that are available to them right now so they're gonna go ahead and put those down onto their board it's now come back to us and we're getting relatively full partially because we had to save so many tiles over from the last round because we weren't able to complete that row and I think that well looking down here there are three teal to black to blue and in yellow which means there's no way we could actually finish out this bottom row and I think we are much more incentivized to try and finish out this top one it's just a single tile but the problem here is that well the single yellow we cannot place it because we placed that in the first turn we could grab with this teal and put it over here and actually this is not a problem at all that means that we could score it would help scoring the black and the red I was thinking we were probably gonna want to grab these black ones and put it over there lose a victory point and then score on this longer chain but actually grabbing this teal is a pretty good alternate option that I hadn't seen until I started talking so let's go ahead and go with that one it's now Wright's turn to pick and they decide to go with these teal over here they're gonna put them down onto their four row left now gets a their pick and they've actually been saving this for a little while they knew they really wanted this yellow tile up at the top but they could tell that we have that we could not place the yellow tile and the right-hand player has had the red on there for pretty much this whole round so they're finally gonna go ahead and grab this tile that they figured they're gonna get to keep anyway and now it goes over to us we have to pick either these two blacks or these two blues and they will either go into this bottom row or we could optionally choose to have them both fall onto the floor which would lose us two victory points and I think grabbing two of a tile is probably worth it to go ahead and plunk down here and commit to try and fill that out with those specific titles of course this is a bit of a risk if very few of those tiles come out of the bag in the next round that could really hamper some of our options but let's go ahead and do that so looking here if we did a black tile it would go here and the blue tile would go there right now we are mostly building down over here but we're also doing quite a bit on this far right column here so I think that blue is definitely the better way for us to go so we can put those here but there is another thing to keep in mind and I'm not going to keep super track of it but there are only 20 of each of these tiles in the back and right now just looking out at the board there's 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 of them already out and we know let's see the left hand player they didn't score any blue but the right hand player did score a couple blues so we've seen more than half of the Blues come out but I think we're still relatively safe for filling these three in on the next turn it'll probably be a big priority for us and we're gonna hope that we get lucky for that so now it goes over to the right hand player they have to take these two black tiles and ooh this is actually pretty bad I didn't even notice this but it was definitely the right call for us take these two blues because it's forced the right hand player to actually take these as negative points it's another thing to keep in mind we can see that they are not allowed to place those blacks on here they'd have to put it in the bottom row but they're not allowed to because they finished that out on the previous turn so it was a really good draft on our part that definitely did head things over here to the right-hand player and with that done there aren't no more tiles left over so the action phase is done for this turn and we can move into scoring and I think from this point on in the video I will just go into the specifics of how we score our area and then just simultaneously do these on the side we of course start off with the teal tile at the top we completed the row so we can bring this over here that's just gonna get us at one point right now which doesn't seem like much but once we starts going the rest of these will be very happy we did that so we can now jump down here and we see that we have all the blacks that we need to finish out this scoring we can place this one right here and now we have both a horizontally adjacent tile and a vertical one so that means we're gonna get one two points for the vertical and then three four points total for the horizontal so that's a four point placement right there so we were at three and now we go all the way up to seven and next up we have this red one we can put this one right here and it's a similar situation to the black tile but it's even better now because we have one two three four five points for this move so that jumps us all the way up to 12 points and lastly with this blue right here we can bring that in over here it's a little bit simpler just three points for that placement but it also sets us up with an even better spot right here on future turns to put a yellow tile down and get even more points so that is let's see three points with that blue tile placement which gets us up to 15 and we can of course ditch all of these tiles to the lid of the box so with two full turns done we've got 15 points and both of our opponents are at 11 it's relatively close and we can now go into the third turn of the game and the left hand player is going to be the star player because they drafted this token in the last turn first things first we have to reset all of the factories the left player now leads us off and they've decided to start off by grabbing all three of these teal tiles right here and they're just gonna fill up their third row there it's now time for us to figure out what we should be doing on our first turn and realistically we went into this round hoping to get three of these blues down so that we could clear this row and unfortunately it looks like just one two three four of those Blues came out entirely so if we were to grab three out of the four then that would be good because we could score this tile over here but if you'll notice that tile is just gonna be worth one point right now but if we were to fill in at this yellow one first then that would be a blue a five point blue tile instead of a one point so that's a pretty big shift and realistically the biggest reason we want blues is to just get them out of our rows because they're clogging us up and potentially going to force us into taking negative points if we don't have the space to put down other tiles link in the round so I think what we should probably do is just start off and to try to fill up this yellow spot there's lots of different opportunities to do this we have three different double yellow locations and two of them have a blue tile on it and I think we should probably do one of those too so we can start getting blue tiles into this center area so hopefully maybe build up two or if we're lucky all three of them to fill this off in one swoop so realistically the only difference between these two is we want a red to come down or a teal to come down and when we look over here we can see that both of our opponents already have the one right up here but if the red came down then there would be two of them and we would actually not mind getting a single red down although I think black is slightly better for us so because of that I think let's go ahead and do this factory over here we'll pull those in we'll take both of these yellows and it will start off that fourth row and hopefully we can finish that out without too many problems I don't think it'll be an issue for the right players turn and they've decided to grab at these two Reds and they're going to put them up in their second row so they finish off that one the left player now goes and they've decided unfortunately for us to grab this blue right here which is gonna dump all of these into the center and it's gonna go all the way up here into their second row so they haven't quite finished it and it is once again our turn and it looks like our dreams of finishing out this bottom row with blues are probably not gonna actually come to pass on this particular turn if the left hand player is already actively trying to get them if they get to then automatically we can on to actually fill this in so I think we're not gonna be able to win that race so instead perhaps what we should just do is maybe lock in these yellows or I wonder if there is a better option available for us right now on the three slot we have the black the teal and the blue open of course the teal isn't great and the black and the teal are nowhere near a lot of our other scoring things and actually this is interesting we kind of want to score the yellow right here and the yellow up here especially if we paired it with a single red would be a very strong play for us so realistically maybe we should go ahead and grab you know the one of these stacks let's go ahead and do this one over here pushing these into the middle and then hopefully we can pick up this last double yellow stack on the next turn we'll go ahead and put these here right now and at this point I'm not terribly sure how badly our opponents want yellow the right hand player can't do all that much with yellow on this turn and over here I suppose the left hand player the yellow right here would be a pretty good spot but they're actually jammed up on that third row so realistically looking at these two things I think the yellows are somewhat safe for us on this turn it's now the right players turn and a they've decided to grab this single black and but they're gonna put it up here and it's just now that we realize that man we probably should have done that on our turn a single black up here would have been worth four or five six points to us and now there are gonna be no more single black tiles in this turn that's really unfortunate I got a little bit blindsided by all of these yellow tile possibilities and realistically getting a double yellow tile up there is just worth three points so I think that was actually a bit of a Miss for us but that is how the right player did their turn we missed it and they were able to pick it up it's a really good combo for them and now the left player is going to take a look and see if it's at some point somebody's gonna dig into all these although the left player is already the start player so they are the least interested of all three of us to grab first in fact the yellow player just needs a single blue and they decide that's what they're gonna do for their turn so this is gonna force us to take these starting player token that's very interesting we all liked the stuff that was out here on the factories so this is gonna go over here and now it's a guarantee that we're gonna get the start player tokens that's a minus one point to us but there is a large variety of different tile sets in here to choose from unfortunately for us at the moment we don't really want these big sets of tiles we're getting somewhat restricted we can only put blues down on the bottom and we could take these two blues to do that but it would not finish out the row which means we would be even more clogged for the left next turn which is not great and then we have these four yellows which we spent two turns grabbing and here we are with the option of just grabbing four yellows I guess we did not quite read into just how little either our opponents wanted yellow tiles on this turn we figured they didn't want them that much but wow they really are avoiding them so when we look to the options that we have we could still take these four yellows and we could put them up here in the two slot it means we would score three points and then lose two points down here but the risk is that there are 1 2 3 4 5 grams left over in this round and that means that we're gonna take a turn and then we're gonna take another turn before this is over and with all these being so large it's very possible we'll take even more negative points which is gonna start to push us into some really nasty spots like the more tiles you take in a given or the more tiles that go on the floor in a given turn the worse it gets all the way up to these minus 3 spots over here so I'm not sure if I want to put 2 down right now part of me feels like we should just go ahead and grab these 2 blues and maybe even lock them up on the 2 slot that way in a worst-case scenario we could put something down in the 3 slot as long as it wasn't yellow if we're stuck with yellow at the very end wow that would be a really painful situation you know what the other option we have available to us are these three blacks and I think let's go ahead and take them we can slide them in right over here and this means that on the next turn if the Blues are still here well we can put them down here or on the 2 slot and if the yellows come back around to us we can still put them up here on that 2 slot suffer the negative points but at least it's not that bad for us in the grand scheme of things so I think this is probably the least bad draft for us at the moment so now we go over to the right player oh yeah and oops we do take this minus 1 token as well which means wow that would actually put us into the negative 2 section if we were to take two of these tiles but anyway we come over to the right-hand player now and they actually take a little bit of the pressure off so to speak because they are gonna take the yellows after all they're gonna slide them in right here onto this row and that doesn't mean they're gonna take one negative point as one of the yells fall down onto the floor we now come to the left players last action and they decide to grab these two blues right here they're gonna put one of its on the top and then the other one they're gonna fall to the floor and suffer a negative one a penalty which means we come back over here and we are definitely not in a great spot these three Reds cannot be placed anywhere well I guess that's not true we could put it into the top row if we wanted to we would take two tiles if we did that and the other option is we could take these four tiles put them into the second row and then it takes two tiles so no matter what we're gonna lose three more points in negative points for the tiles falling onto the floor we now just need to look up here and see what did the right call is if we take the teal it would go over here and we would just get one point if we put the red into that second column I mean into the first column we would at least get two points and we're setting ourselves up to I really do a really awesome black tile placement on the later turn I think that is probably slightly better than this teal is kind of hanging out all on its lonesome so we'll take all three of these Reds one of them will go up to the top and then we'll go down here which is definitely pretty painful for us the final turn goes to the right-hand player they obviously have to take these deals and they decided to put two of them right here and they have a pretty painful turn here as well so at least we can share our misery of losing all these negative points with one opponent and with that we have now finished all of the actions for this turn so we can all simultaneously score on our board first things first we get to place this red right there that's gonna get us two points and now we skip down to when we can place this black tile here which is going to hit us one point and then we have this yellow which will go over here and thankfully get us a lot more points than our first two did that'll be one two three four five six points so that goes one two three four five six but then unfortunately we're gonna lose four points for all of these negatives down here and that is going to bring us right back to 20 at this point we once again check to see if the game is over looking over to our left and they have two different rows that are only two tiles away from being finished we have one of those rows actually we have two of those rows that also are the same number and the same goes over here so we are all kind of in the middle point of the game and we can now start dealing out to the tiles from the bag but I could already tell by the weight of the bag then we are not going to have enough to pull out for this next round this means that it's time for us to take all of these tiles and dump them back into the bag we get to take the first action because we were forced into taking this first player token on the last round and this worked out really well for us there is one factory that has three of the blue tiles on it and I don't think there's really that much other analysis we have to do we want to get three blues down here because we've had these sticking on here for a couple different turns and that's also a really good scoring spot for us now so we'll go ahead and make this our first turn and now it goes over to the right-hand player who is pretty bummed they would have loved to get all three of those blues to plunk down right there it would fit right in the middle of there oddly symmetric board over here but they are also relatively happy to take their turn and go ahead and grab it these two black tiles and put it into their four row the left player now gets to go and they've decided to take two black tiles as well but for them they're gonna put it into their third row it's now come back to us and I think that we don't want to make the same mistake we did last turn by giving up on the option to take a single black tile that will score us a ton of points if we put a black tile right there that's gonna be worth eight points and right now there is only one more of the single black tiles now it looks like we're all just grabbing these black tiles like crazy in this round I think that's probably our best bet if we look around here we do have a really nice yellow spot but there's really not that many yellows out I suppose we saw tons of them in the last turn so it's not too surprising that there are money less of them on this round so let's go ahead and do this for our turn we'll go ahead and dump all these in and we'll lock that in up there it's now the right hand players turn and they decide to continue their black tile grabbing adventures by taking both of those so they can lock that in there's only two more black tiles out here now play now goes over to our left hand opponent and they've decided to grab these two reds and put them into their double row just like that so there is now quite a bit of variety in the middle for us to choose from but we also have a DS over here when we look over at our board we can tell that the two yellow spawn is actually really quite good for us that would be worth five points and also the blue spot that is on the three column well a row that is right now it's just worth three points for us but if we were to able to do it in a line with the yellow then it would be worth I guess six points but realistically we have to do these in an order and I think that makes the yellow a much higher target it does mean that we are to take the starting player token again which means we will lose a point in doing that I mean our other options are we could take these three Till's put them on the three line that would score us just two points which is not terribly strong at this point and let's see we can't even take these two blacks and to put the blacks on that that single line there so I think that grabbing these two yellows is the right course of action it means we get to go first again next round although that would have happened anyway it stops or one of our opponents from taking it but it is unfortunate losing those points the right player now gets to go and they are overwhelmed with joy that we did not notice how badly they needed these three tiles they're gonna lock these in right there and that is a really good spot that's gonna be worth eight points overall to them and realistically now we realized that maybe we should have taken those first although if this was the better way for us to score a large amounts of points with our tiles we have to of course value what our opponents can do versus what we can do especially in a three player game where we have two different opponents to target you don't want to spend too much time counter drafting against one person and let the other person do well so either way I think our turn was okay but the right player is very happy with the decision that we made because it allowed them to do that it's the left players turn again and they've decided they're gonna grab these two black tiles they're only gonna put one of them on their board it's gonna go up there and the other ones gonna fall down onto the floor losing them a couple points but this is still a pretty good combo right there with the red and the black over there on their board so these both get shuffled into the middle and with only three different colors left that means that this is gonna be our last grab of the round so let's see what we can do here we're certainly not interested in this single yellow on the turn so we have four Reds and we have four teals our four row is fortunately open although we could realistically also put them into the three row if that made sense because that we would just lose one extra point but the teal right here would end up being a three point score and the red would just end up being a one point score and the teal would line up well with the yellow if we were able to get three blues down here on the next turn to get another big scoring action done so I think that laying for teal down is probably the best call for us so we'll go ahead and throw those on our board the right player now gets to choose from these two options and they've decided they're gonna grab these four Reds it's not quite enough to fill in that row so unfortunately that means it's gonna clog up their area but they are pretty happy with it because it's gonna line up well with the four blacks that they just put in here they are gonna be finishing off this column on this turn and that means they're setting themselves up really well to finish off a second column on their second turn and if you remember down here you actually get seven points for each completed column so it's definitely something to shoot for so with that done it that means that this single yellow tile is going to go over here to the left-hand player and they can either plant on the board in the four or five section or they could just let it fall to the floor and lose a point for themselves and they are okay with that they want to leave themselves open for the next turn they have no idea how many yellows are gonna come out and they don't want to clog up either of these large rows for just that single tile and single point with that we are done drafting so we can now score we of course start our scoring on the top row we'll take this single black tile and it's gonna be a very good one for us and Nestle's in right there and that'll be worth one two three four five six seven eight points so that brings us from 20 all the way up to twenty eight and then this yellow will Nestle in right there getting us one two three four five more points so we go up to 33 this teal goes right over here that gives us three more points so we go to 36 and lastly this blue goes all the way over there we've been holding onto two of these five for a couple turns now but this is great because it locks in there and gets us five more points bringing us up to 41 and then of course we have to lose one point because we have this single thing on the floor which is the starting player token so we get to go first on the next round so we finish that round with 40 points at this point we once again check for the end game trigger we see over here the left hand player has two different rows that are one away from finishing we have one row that's one away from completing and then over here the right hand player has three different rows that are two away from completing but I think with the left player having two in us having one it's somewhat likely that this fifth turn could be our last so let's once again fill up those factories we can now go ahead and start with the first term because we grab the token on the last round and there are a few things for us to think about since we are getting it very close to the end of the game I think it'll either be this turn or the next we can start really thinking about these endgame scoring options one of them as I just mentioned is gonna be seven points for a completed column but another one is ten points if you have all five of a color and you'll notice that there are five spots for each of the five colors on this 5x5 grid and right now we have four out of the five yellow tile spots so this means that we are somewhat incentivized to actually try and go yellow on this bottom row and fill this in to get those ten extra points even though realistically right now that would also be worth just plus one point out here on the board looking at other options this spot right here would be amazing if we were able to get five teal that would be let's see five six seven points plus another seven for completing that column so that would be a 14 point placement but the problem is right now there's just one two three four five teal tiles out entirely so we would need to get all five of them in order to make that work and I think that gambit is not good especially when we consider neither of our opponents have placed the single teal up on the top row and it's actually pretty good for both of them so I think it would be almost impossible for us to actually pull off the five on the bottom row so if we look at higher up we notice there are two good blue spots here if we were able to put a blue right here that we worth one two three four five six seven points and if we put a blue right here that we worth one two three four five six and the only difference between these besides the one point is that this second row only takes two tiles and the third row takes three and we could just start off and take these two tiles right here and be done with it and not worry about the stress of potentially trying to fill in that last one just to get one extra point in fact I think as the round goes on we'll be more likely to have to accidentally take more minus points when we try to go after that last one and if we had just stuck with this so I think this is actually a pretty good first turn let's go ahead and take these two blues we'll put them in here on the two spot and that frees us up to potentially put three teals down into this location but again seals are a bit of a hot commodity so I think this should play out relatively well for us and now let's see what the right player does after thinking about it for a minute they have decided to go ahead and grab it this single red tile and put it actually down here on to their final row the left hand player now gets to go and they've decided to grab these two teal tiles and they're gonna put them right there and what that means is that this is gonna be the final turn of the game by locking those in that means they are definitely gonna score this final spot on that horizontal so we all know that these are the last drafts that we will realistically get to do we only have one more regular score to do before we go into those final ones but I'm getting a little ahead of myself it now comes back to our turn and right now we look we see the center has these three yellows and it has these two blacks and that is maybe interesting to us realistically the things that we are still hunting are these five yellows down on the bottom and then probably a well I guess definitely a blue up on the top if we know that the this is the last turn of the game we may as well put a blue down there which will score five points and another two for completing that horizontal another thing to keep in mind is that we already have these two blues here if we were able to get a blue at the top and three blues here that would complete all of our blues and we would potentially get 10 more bonus points for that but right now there is one two three four blues exactly out so that would be a very hard thing for us to pull off I guess realistically what we have to decide now is is it worth it grabbing these three yellows right now it would lose us a point because there's no reason to actually have this first player talking at the end of the game or do we maybe do something else like grab one of these single blues and put it up into our top row while we try to wait to get a cluster of five of these yellow tiles and put it down over there on the board and I think that there is a reasonable fear that we might go actually over seven over five in order to actually go here and then they'll fall out into the floor anyway so I think for this turn let's go ahead and do the devil we know versus the one we don't let's go ahead and take this first player marker which realistically means we're just gonna be losing a point and we'll grab it these three yellows and hope to grab one of these two sets to finish this out later on in the turn it's now the right player's turn to go and they're gonna grab these two black tiles and put it onto their second row the left player now takes their turn and they're gonna grab this single black tile these will come into the center and this will complete their third row it's once again back to us and there are still three of these single blues available so I figure let's go ahead and grab one of these two pairs of yellows and if we were to take this pair then one of those three sets will be gone and I suppose it's hypothetically possible that it could go away by our next turn but it's very unlikely that this left hand player would actually take the other blue although they of course could take something else that is associated with the blue and then it gets shoved down here into the factory so I think I'm down here into the middle of the factories so let's go ahead and take these two down here kind of preserving all three of these potential options for us to grab that last blue without suffering even more penalty points the right player now chooses this factory right here they're gonna grab the single teal tile into their top row and now the left player is gonna do something very similar by grabbing these two teal tiles they'll put it one of them along the top and the other one is gonna be worth a negative one point for them it's once again come back to us and we have two of these single blue options available to us all four of these are still available so technically there is a glimmer of hope to try and snag this one and this one right here but the problem is that we would have to get all those without either of our opponents noticing that we're gonna want to sneak one of those in because that is worth quite a bit of extra points so the other thing that we could realistically think about on this turn is well these yellows are not too great for us in fact we've maxed out our yellows this red we there is it just barely enough Reds to fit in here in two turns if we were able to grab both of those and at the moment it looks unlikely that our opponents would grab those Reds either but we I think need to think about what our highest priority goal is and I think it's gonna be to just get this blue down so let's go ahead and take this one slide these Reds over here and we have now finished our top row and we would have started the end game anyway ourselves it's now the right players turn to go and they're gonna seize the opportunity to grab these three Reds I guess they could have all round long and they're gonna place them right up there onto their board play has now come back to the left hand player and when they look out on the board well right now they have the four and the five saw it left over and there are three yellows three Blues in a single read and a single black so that means there's no way that either left player is gonna be able to fill any more of their columns so now they're just thinking longevity like what will allow them to get through the rest of this round with taking the least amount of negative points you know they have decided they are gonna go ahead and grab it these two blues right here plain-out comes to us and we are in a similar boat because we have kind of achieved all the objectives we realistically thought we had able be able to pull off on this turn so I figure let's see we certainly can't take any of these yellows those will get forced right onto the floor so hopefully that doesn't actually happen to us then we could take a black tile and put it down here which would leave us the ability to put a blue one up there but realistically there is no mutually exclusive situation over here on the board so I figure let's just go ahead and we'll grab this blue right here dumping the rest into the middle that means there's gonna be three more drafts and that does mean that that we are gonna be actually hold on maybe we don't want to do this I guess either way we're gonna have to take one more draft but if we shove all those together that means we really might take all of those yellows we're versus if we take this red one then there's potentially 1 2 3 4 more drafts which means some more negative points might spill over here onto our ponen so it might be bad for us but it's bad for somebody else as well so yeah let's go ahead and change our mind a little bit and we'll put this red tile down right there play now goes over here to the right-hand player and they are gonna take this blue right here which means these are gonna slide into the middle and the same thing is gonna happen where will be the last one standing they kind of notice that it was not a guarantee there'd be 4 more drafts but us changing our turn made sense at least so we had the possibility of punting things down a little bit but within that grab it now goes over here to the left-hand player and they are probably yeah they're just gonna take this black tile they definitely want us to suffer all these negative points they can obviously see that we can't take any more of them it was a bit of a liability for them to be so many of these yellow tiles in this round but they're gonna go ahead and grab this one and they can slide it down right over there which means it is now our final turn of the game and we have no decisions to make we're simply gonna take all of these and plunk them down there which means we're gonna lose 5 points with that play our opponents really did to kind of outmaneuver us there near the end of the game and that really stung with that we have finished all of the drafts in this final turn of the game let's now do the standard scoring first things first we have our top row we'll slide that blue one right in there which is gonna give us five points bringing us up to forty five this blue will snug in right there that's gonna give us one two three four five six points so we go up to 51 and then lastly down here that yellow is gonna go right there which gives us just one point but again that was gonna be good for us for the end game scoring unfortunately we're not done yet because we have a four of these things on the floor that's one two three four five six at negative points so we go all the way down let's see over here two forty six with the regular scoring done we can now confirm that the game is indeed over because there is at least one horizontal row on anybody's board that is completely full so let's now go into the final scoring of the game if you remember correctly down here it says that for every full horizontal line you get plus two points for every full vertical line you get seven and then for every complete set of all five colors you will get ten points in an A for the left-hand player over here they were able to complete two horizontal lines that is gonna give them four points but they were unable to finish any verticals or complete sets so this leaves their final score at fifty four we were able to complete a one horizontal row so that's gonna give us two points we were also able to complete one vertical row so that is gonna give us seven points and lastly we were able to complete one full set of colors because we have all five at the yellow we got really close with the blue but we only have one set so that means we go from 55 up to 65 for our final score lastly we have the right hand player they completed no horizontal lines they were not able to get any sets of color but they were able to pull off two of these complete vertical lines that is going to be 14 points for them they were at fifty eight already so that's gonna bring them up to 72 so when all was said and done the right hand player pulled off a solid win with 72 points we came in second with 65 any of the left hand player trail behind a bit with 54 points and that completes our full three player game of Azul well I hope you enjoyed this playthrough my mango here was to try and show not only how cutthroat the drafting of the tiles can be from the center of the table but also I wanted to show these strategic intricacies that come into play with trying to figure out what tiles to actually take and score into your grid because it's not always obvious what the right thing to do is and when the first time you sit down to play this game it's very easy to look down and be like oh cool I could take four of a color I should probably do that because that's hard to do but that might not be your best move there are many times as we saw on into this playthrough then to the right opening move was to take a single Tyl of a single color and place it down into the player board because that was a thing that would unlock tons of points like you might get five black tiles and score one point or get one black tile and score eight so these are all the things that you are trying to figure out why you're playing and I was of course trying to do that for all three of the characters while also trying to pay attention to what each of their opponents were doing because the drafting it has so much indirect player conflict because you are taking these tiles that you are denying options from your opponents when you go after those factory spots but also you might see that your opponent really wants to put three teal tiles down so you might take from a factory that will push two more into that center area and now there are five teal tiles so are they gonna grab it and then suffer those negative points or are they going to shift up their strategy and trying to go with something else and all of these things were things that I was really trying to focus on while I was filming the playthrough so that you could see that cutthroat nature as well as all of the various options that you have to score a variety of points as you are building out the same pattern of tiles you know all three characters we we did various things than like we went really hard on yellow and some of our opponents didn't have anywhere near as much of that and it was kind of interesting to see that the amount of differentiation with the the patterns at all the times we had in front of us considering we were actually going after the same base pattern of colors right for the very beginning of the game so yeah I think this was a pretty good example of the game I think the scores were about as close as I would have liked of course I would have liked to have won and honestly I thought I was going to win when I did the final scoring I kind of counted all up and realized oh actually we lost by a relatively decent margin and I didn't give enough credence to the victory point engine that the right hand player was able to make by essentially getting all those tiles together they were able to keep scoring those tiles over and over again where we had quite a few straggler tiles that maybe only scored once or twice and that really is the game like you've got to score these tiles as many times as you can in order to get victory but then also those endgame victory point options can be a really big deal you know the right-hand player got fourteen points by completing two of those vertical columns we only did one of those and was one of the differences on the game in the game you know if we had been able to get a bunch of Till's down instead of those yellows we would have had a much stronger score although of course by doing the yellows we got the 10 points for having all of that color so as you can see and I hope it was obvious as you were watching the video there are a bunch of different things that you need to be thinking about while you're trying to figure out what tiles are you grabbing from the middle of the table the game does it seems simple but there are a lot of avenues that your brain needs to go down in order to figure out what they actually want to do so I think that wraps up all of my thoughts on at this playthrough and as always I'd like to thank everyone who's been supporting this channel through patreon including all of these producers level pledges if you two would like to directly support the channel you could do so at patreon.com slash young it's games and I would really appreciate it also if you like to see more full game playthroughs like this one as well as in depth board game reviews and vlogs please subscribe to the channel thanks for watching

Channel: JonGetsGames

Views: 42,563

Rating: 4.9259257 out of 5

Keywords: jongetsgames, johngetsgames, azul, azul game, jongetsgames azul, azul runthrough, azul runthru, azul playthrough, azul playthru, azul play through, azul play thru, azul run through, azul run thru, azul board game

Id: HgOwmcOkpJc

Length: 55min 24sec (3324 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 22 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/therasim]

I am a huge fan of the content that JgG is producing. He has an extremely welcoming persona and just the right balance between casual and professional that makes watching his videos an extreme pleasure. Between him and Ant Lab games, I really hope this is the direction we're moving towards for pre-recorded playthroughs.

[u/JErosion]

I wasn't sure what to think of Azul when it was first announced but seeing it played makes it look like a deceptively tight game

[u/sbrbrad]

This looks like a way more thinky and vicious version of Sagrada. I neeeeeeed it.

[u/Jockshua]

He absolutely killed it on this review. Solid playthrough with great explanations advising the draft choices and how to arrange. I am so happy to finally see a full playthrough on this game.

I’ve been back and forth between this and Sagrada. Both mechanics seem great but I really like the look of Azul more.

What do you think if you have played Sagrada? Please let me know!

[u/CaptainTDM]

Is this video in accelerated? I can't shake the feeling that the video has been speeded up. Its kinda funny to watch.

[u/SageClock]

Thanks for posting this, I might have missed it otherwise. I did pre-order the game based on reading the rules, but I still couldn't really see for sure how it would play out. Now I know for sure I will love this game and don't have to worry I might have made a bad purchase.