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There are no bad topics, at most bad workmanship.
This could be one of the slogans of the board game world and one of the great lessons of the last fifteen years. Around 2005, at the time of the Hungarian appearance of the settlers of Catan, the revival of board games began in Hungary: since then, it is no longer clear to members of a narrow and dedicated group that board games with childhood or childishness and who laughs in the end? and it is not equal to Monopoly, but an ideal form of entertainment that hides almost infinite possibilities.
Right now, it really is made for everyone, no matter what their preference is for themes, confrontation, duration, thinking, strategy or any other criteria. Also, since all forms of out-of-home entertainment have ceased to exist due to the epidemic and the coronavirus quarantine, the role of board games has become more valuable to many, especially those who can play up to two people well. .
The richness of the theme is that, in addition to the warrior-fantasy line, it has become a global success of birdwatching games, pup pups in housing estates, female cat lovers, modern urban design engineers , which make Mars habitable, the lack of assets under socialism, An issue that may be familiar to some people, the spread of a previously unknown pandemic. And sometimes someone throws issues on the market that nobody would think would be a worldwide success, but it still happens. An example of such a theme is
Okay, if we say that it is not a simple mosaic, it is a matter of decorating a royal palace, and not of simple covering materials, but of beautiful Portuguese tiles of Arab origin, decorated in a thousand ways, everything sounds more compatible with the board games, and it is more understandable that Blue has become the best summary and the second best family game in the list of all the board games in the world, in the most outstanding list of BoardGameGeek and also in the top 50 of the all time list.
And yet, in fact, Azul’s strength is not the unusual basic idea, although success may be a large part of the simple basic premise that
Anyone who has been to Portugal as a tourist will surely take the game off the shelf and at least wonder if they don’t want a slightly more exciting piece of the country’s top tourist attraction, plus the fridge magnet.
And the original Blue, the second and third part of the game since then, and the additional accessory really work almost as ornaments too: the main elements of the toys, the elaboration of the tiles and glass panels, the window and the model of the building It stores them, also as tile. In each game, the different colored duffel bags do a lot, in addition to the game experience, to make one happy to take out the game.
But Azul is really good to be, just a little over the top, this missing link between abstract and thematic strategy games. That is, it can also suit someone who hates abstract games “completely” like chess or queen, and prefers to build or grow castles if he is playing board games, and also someone who is upside down. Because while Azul is based on unpacking cubes of different colors in a specific order, which is an absolute abstract game mechanism, everything is much more acceptable than most abstract games. Not only does it require a strategic mindset similar to constructor-farmer games because of its versatility, but also because of its popular tone, good design, and integration of the entire game in history; For example, we not only earn negative points, but we suck because of dropped and broken tiles. Easy to love the game.
Also, the two newer versions after the first one are always a better one than the previous one, and the plugin is excellent.
Blue is also related to thematic / strategy games by practically translating the drawing into the language of abstract games. This relatively new game mechanism means that a person not only owns or can play the cards dealt to him, but after selecting one of the cards in his hand, he must pass it on to another player; So it’s not just about what one player needs, but also what he doesn’t want the other to get and whether it’s worth hiding from him for just that reason.
The three Blue games start with: you have to download the glass tiles or boards onto the discs for these four, and you can always collect the ones from the four groups at once and transfer the rest to the common one. The mosaic pieces collected in this way can be played according to different rules.
- In the first game, Blue, you need to collect a certain amount of a color to place a tile on the tile, so only one tile is enough for the first row of the tile, but at the bottom you already need five identical colors to insert only one piece.
- In the second part, the wonders of Sintra glass, each piece of the pink glass panel must be inserted into the defined pattern, and once a window has been completed, the palace window giving the points can be further built.
- In the third game, The Royal Pavilion, you must download several tiles of different tile colors, but you must have more and more tiles of the same color to insert each new tile piece into a pattern.
But all this is just the statute, zero step. What makes the game really exciting are the additional rules that are different in the three games, which are already ingenious, as the creator always twists one on this relatively simple basis. Beginners in Blue can play by having a mandatory place for each color in each row, but they can also put anything anywhere, but each row and each column can only have any of the five colors once, which is much more difficult to calculate from what it seems. The points depend on how many other tiles that have been placed before come into contact with the new one, that is, it is worth building next to each other, because if I put a tile at the beginning of the first row and one at the end, because that It seemed simple, the two points if, on the other hand, I put it next to each other, the second is worth two points in itself. If it ends at the meeting point of a column and a row that is already there, it will also be a multiple of that value.
The wonders of Sintra glass, on the other hand, have introduced a bonus-worthy color compared to this, which means I can build a window of any color in any round, but if I can finish a predominant color in that round, that color it’s worth more in that round, I’m much better. What makes this second game exciting is that the worker already has to move here, meaning if he doesn’t decorate one of the following windows in the queue, he even has to back off before he can get to the glass panel, i.e. he almost lost a circle, which varied quite a bit; And it is also related to this that all the boards already built to the right of the given window grant extra points, so whoever goes in a good line will not get any bonus.
The most complex game and therefore the best is the third one now released, The Royal Pavilion. In this, Michael Kiesling, a German who also made all three games and also known as Tikal, basically varied things. There is no extra color here, but a changing wildcard color in each round that can be used to replace any color. And here it is no longer simply the player who decides which tokens to collect, because there can always be only one bonus color at a time, but one is mandatory if you are in the four legged group from which you would choose something. And an entirely new element has even been added to the game: additional reward tokens can be drawn from a common set, provided the surrounding mosaic pieces surround a statue or column of the pavilion. And scoring also requires deeper thought, because you can play according to three essentially mutually exclusive strategies: You also get a lot of bonus points if you download a sample entirely, which of course costs a lot; There is an advantage even if we don’t even complete any of them completely, but we download at least the first few pieces of all the samples; And here too, the point value of each tile placed depends on how many pieces are already inserted next to it.
Therefore, it is true for each game that there are only as many rules as can be perfectly learned with a single test game of approximately half an hour, but this is enough to think of each game, constantly forming a strategy, never a single part being It becomes routine, and they don’t always have work tactics. And it depends on the player given how much interaction there will be between the players: in principle, you can only pay attention to your own board, but it is not difficult to be more militant if we know what color the other is collecting, and even if we do not. It would be very important. Or if we see what color he doesn’t know what to start with, we still leave it to him.
And while the Crystal Mosaic plugin doesn’t add as much to the base game as the two sequels twist the baseline, even that minimal change can really transform the gaming experience. (On one side of the new boards in the plugin, there are score multiplication fields that require a surprisingly serious strategy, on the other hand, the score differs, and the tiles need to be placed in a different pattern.) This also sheds light on what makes Azul games work so well. – You can fundamentally rearrange the gaming experience with even slight variations of rules and mechanism changes. One might think that there is nothing simpler than grouping some tiles by color, but each game with Blue only shows that
no idea is too simple, at most you are not careful enough to execute
If, on the other hand, everything is cleverly invented, the point is like the three Azul.
Who do we recommend it to? For anyone who has been to Portugal before, but especially for those who want to open up to the abstract as fans of strategy games, or who, as masters of chess or the mill, also want a colorful game on some theme and execution.
How many can play Two, three or four, and the game is also ideal during quarantine: it’s as good for two as playing more, nothing undermines the experience.
How much The price of the three basic games ranges from 10-10 thousand forints, the supplement is approximately 4 thousand forints.
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