Designer Michael Kiesling and Plan B Games have created board game gold in Azul. This is a tile-drafting, pattern-building game, with set collection bonuses up for grabs. Here you’re decorating a palace with Moorish azulejo tiles. The Portuguese king has commissioned you with a 5x5 pattern. Azul is a challenge to see who can impress the king with their tiled walls!

Traditional azulejos are white and blue, but in Azul they come in five colours/patterns. And we’re not talking cardboard punchboards or wooden tokens for components. The 100 ‘Starburst’-sized azulejo tiles are bakelite material. They make a wonderful clacking noise when jangled in the cloth bag!

To start a round, four tiles get drawn from the bag and placed onto each ‘factory’. Players take turns drafting tiles from any factory of their choice. Whenever they pick tiles from a factory, they have to take all tiles of a matching type present there. Those they don’t draft join a new, separate factory. As the round wears on, this separate factory grows in size, but the drafting of tiles rule applies here, too. Players draft tiles until all factories sit empty.