| 👨👩👧👦 | Players: 2 |
| ⏳ | Time: 30-45 minutes |
| 🎂 | Ages: 10+ |
| ⚙️ | Mechanisms: Tile drafting and placement |
I know, I know, another two-player version of an already popular game! Stick with us though, because Azul Duel is worth your time.
In Duel, you again take on the role of a master artisan, this time working to bring some much-needed colour to the ceiling of the palace.
It borrows quite heavily from the original, which isn’t a bad thing, but there are enough differences to bring a fresh feel to the game. There’s a bigger area to complete, variable scoring goals, and quite a bit more.
Take the changes to the way you draft tiles: The leftovers don’t go to a central pool anymore, instead they stay on their own little factory tile and you get to stack them in any order you choose. Need three yellow? If you plan it right you can have them, exactly when you want them. If you see the other player wants specific tiles, just stack them at the bottom of the pile to mess with their strategy!
You don’t have a fixed pattern to complete and instead you need to collect pieces to form your tiling area each round. This allows you adapt to whatever tiles are coming out of the bag and lets you try and match what you are collecting to where you place them. All this freedom can come with a price though. This part of the game is definitely a puzzle in its own right and adds a bit more complexity than original Azul had.
It’s very well balanced though, and while some parts are more challenging, you now have bonus chips that can be used to complete a row, spots that can take any coloured tile, and even spaces that auto-fill as soon as you complete the ones around them.
We absolutely love the original and have played dozens of games at two without noticing any problems, so why would we play this version? Well, for us this actually feels like Azul 1.5. None of the changes are so major that they make it feel like a completely different game, but together they add up to something that gives us familiar feels with some added depth to keep things interesting.
Azul is one of our most played games of all time, so we couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a look at this new entry in the series.
You can see this post on Instagram here and if you are interested you can find out more about the game on the Asmodee website!
The copy of Azul Duel used for this review was provided to A Tale of Two Meeples by VR Distribution
The Boardgame Detective 