How to play Azul

hey everyone what's going on neil here from busy dad's board gaming where i hope to help you connect face-to-face with family and friends through board games if you're new here make sure to click that subscribe button and check below in the doobly-doo for any sort of information pertaining to this video today i'm going to teach you how to play azul azul is a game designed by michael kiesling and published by next move games it is a 2-4 player game in which you an artist has been commissioned by the great king manuel the first to embellish the walls of his royal palace with these beautifully colored wall tiles so with all that being said let's dive right into the setup [Music] to set up for a game of zulu first give each player a player board player boards are double sided with a color side and a gray side which is used for variant play for your first game and what i'll be going over here i recommend using the colored side you can then throw the factory displays out in the center of the table you use a different amount of displays depending on the number of players so in the case of this two-player game we'll use five if for some reason you don't already have all the tiles in the tile bag you can go ahead and place those in there now there should be a total of 100 20 of each color you can then return any unused player boards scoring markers and factory displays to the box the player who most recently visited portugal takes the start player token and then fills all the factory displays with exactly four tiles or in the case of my group you choose someone at random because none of us have been to portugal the object of the game is to be the player with the most points at the end the game ends after a round in which at least one player has completed a horizontal line of five consecutive tiles on their wall in azul players will take turns in a clockwise fashion round after round until the end game condition has been met each round consists of three phases the first phase is the factory offers phase in which players take turns taking tiles from either a factory display or from the center of the table and placing it on their player board any tiles not taken move to the center of the table phase two is the wall tiling phase in which you'll actually take the tiles from completed pattern lines and place them on your wall discarding the remainder phase three is the prepare for the next round phase in which the start player will then refill all the factory displays and then you'll carry on with phase one again so let's take a dive down to the game to see what that will actually look like phase one begins with the start player taking the start player marker and placing it in the center of the table and then taking their first turn on your turn you must pick tiles in one of the following ways first you can pick tiles from a factory display when you do you must take all tiles of the same color any remaining tiles are pushed into the center of the table if you were the first player of the game you will have to take tiles from the display after you've done one of the two options you then add the tiles you picked to one of the five pattern lines on your player board you can see here that the first line holds one tile the second two and so on so in this case i'm going to take the three red and place them on the third line we'll speak more about what pattern lines mean in a moment your second option if you don't want tiles from a factory display you can choose to take tiles from the center of the table if you're the first person to take tiles from the center of the table you must also take the start player token and place it on the floor line of your board we'll talk about what that means soon and for the purposes of this since it doesn't make sense to take from the center of the table we're going to fast forward a couple of moves and then come back to it we've now moved a little bit further into the first phase and you can see now that there are no tiles left on the factory display so the only option for this player in this case is to take tiles from the center of the table as i mentioned before when you take tiles from the center of the table you must also take the start player token when you do so you take the start player token and you move it onto the first space of your floor line we'll speak in a few moments exactly what effect the floor line has on you as a player but for the moment there are of course a few things you have to follow when placing tiles on a pattern line first the tiles are placed one by one from right to left so the start player of this round is going to go ahead and take these two blue ones and place them on their fourth pattern line going from right to left the second player will then take the two red and place them on their fifth pattern line in the same way if the pattern line already holds tiles you can only add tiles of the same color to it so this player is going to take these two orange however since this already holds blue tiles they'll have to place them down here again following the rule that they have to be placed from right to left once all the spaces of a pattern line are filled that line is considered complete if you have picked up more tiles than you can place in a chosen pattern line you must place the excess tiles in the floor line the whole point of the first phase is to complete as many pattern lines as you can because in the wall tiling phase coming up next you will only be able to move tiles from a completed pattern line to your wall in order to score points in all later rounds you have to also comply with the following rule you cannot place tiles of a certain color in a pattern line whose corresponding line on your wall already holds tiles of that color so for an example if i already had this blue tile placed on the first line of my wall i would not be able to place blue tiles on my first pattern line now let's take a look at the floor line any tiles that you picked up and couldn't play or did not want to play must be placed in your floor line filling spaces from left to right you probably already see where this is going these tiles are considered to have fallen on the floor and give you minus points in the wall tiling phase the factory offer phase ends when the center of the table and all displays are empty now let's carry on to the wall tiling phase this phase can be carried out by all players simultaneously however i recommend taking turns for the first few games as you get the scoring down your wall tiling phase carries on like so first go through your pattern lines from top to bottom if you have a completed line move the right most tile of each completed line to the same color space and the corresponding line of your wall each time you move a tile score points immediately so before moving this tile we would score points for this tile however we will be going over scoring once we get a little bit further into the game so i can give you more examples so we moved our blue tile we'll then move our orange and then our black tile and then we'll do the same with the other player all other tiles from your completed lines that were not used get placed back in the lid of the box once that is done any pattern line that was incomplete on your player board can stay there through the following rounds finally at the end of the wall tiling phase check if you have any tiles on your floor line for each tile in your floor line you lose a number of points indicated directly above it adjust your scoring marker on your score track accordingly but just so you know you can never go below zero so although this player is now the first player of the next round they do lose one point afterwards remove all the tiles from the floor line if there were any and place them in a pile somewhere on the table or in the lid of the box if you had grabbed the starting player marker during the factory offer phase and place it on your floor line do not put it aside but instead place it in front of you we can now move on to the final phase the preparing for the next round phase if anyone has completed a horizontal line of five consecutive tiles you will move on to the end of the game otherwise we will prepare for the next round the starting player indicated by who is holding the starting player marker refills each display with four tiles from the bag just as you did in the setup if the bag is empty you can now refill it with all the tiles you set aside from previous rounds and continue filling the displays in the rare case that in later rounds you run out of tiles again while there are none left in the lid start the new round as usual even though not all displays are filled and there you have it that concludes a full round of azul i'll now fast forward a little bit further into the game so that we can have a little bit more tiles on our wall and we can talk about scoring all right so now we've fast forwarded a few rounds into the future and this is where we stand so for scoring points in azul when you move a tile from your pattern line to your wall and there are no adjacent tiles it scores one point if i move this blue to this location there would be no adjacent tiles so it would only score one point if when you move a tile from your pattern line to your wall and there are other tiles horizontally linked to the newly placed tile gain a point for every tile in the row including the one you just placed so in this instance we have one two three four five and that can be tracked up here then check to see if there are one or more tiles vertically linked to the newly placed tile and gain a point for every tile in the column including again the one you just placed however in this case there are no tiles vertically linked but when we take this black one from our completed pattern line and we move it into the location we have one two three four five and then we check vertically counting the newly placed tile again six seven so that tile placement would score us seven points and then you carry on down as before so one for that and then one for that now you can see here that we've amassed a bit of tiles on our floor line so we would subtract 2 4 6 7 8 points from that and there you have it that is how you score points in azul you may have noticed that not only have we completed one horizontal line of five consecutive tiles but we've actually completed two so in this situation after the wall tiling phase has completed we then move on to the end game scoring which we'll do now once the game has ended you score additional points if you've achieved any of the goals shown in the bottom right of the player board this here indicates that you get an additional two points for every horizontal line you've completed so in our case an additional four this here indicates that you get an additional seven points for every vertically completed line so one vertically completed line we would get seven and then finally this indicates here that you score 10 points for each color of which you have placed all five tiles on your wall you can see here we have placed all five blue tiles so we score an additional 10 points there you have it final score for this player is 65. let's see how the other player made out in the end this player ended with 65 points and this player was 62 declaring this player the winner in the case of a tie the tied players with the most horizontal lines wins the game if that does not break the tie the victory is shared there are also rules for the varian play that can be found at the back of the rulebook on page six but i'll let you discover that on your own and there you have it that is how you play azul if you have any comments or questions please feel free to leave them in the comments section below if you've gotten any sort of value out of this video please consider liking and subscribing as well as sharing it with some family and friends as it really goes a long way into helping the channel grow also you can find me over on facebook instagram as well as twitter links for everything in the description below but until next time thanks for tuning in and happy gaming [Music] you

Channel: Busy Dad's Board Gaming

Views: 5,853

Rating: 4.9633026 out of 5

Keywords: tutorial, board game, gaming, azul, games, how to play, tabeltop

Id: TfRivyO2KEg

Length: 15min 16sec (916 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 12 2020