Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra

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Gameplay: Stained Glass of Sintra takes everything about Azul and makes it a bit more complicated with not too much upside. The trademark tile drafting system of Azul remains the same in Sinatra, but the big difference is that you are working a more dynamic board that changes and there are many more rules to scoring. Scoring is probably easier to do than in Azul but there is more to it. Sintra is a Portuguese city in the foothills of the Sintra Mountains near the capital city of Lisbon. It is a popular tourist destination as it contains some picturesque palaces and castles which contain the colourful artwork of the Moors. It is this artwork that was captured in the original Azul game using tiles and has been carried through to the glass of the follow-up game, Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra. Whilst the tiles looked very effective, I am not so convinced by the “glass” Pane Pieces which remind me of hard boiled sweets from my youth called “Spangles”. Nevertheless Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra is an attractive game and looks interesting on the gaming table.

To summarise the drafting of glass, there are nine glass factories (in a four-player game). Each offers four pieces of coloured glass, drawn randomly from a bag. In your turn, you can select ALL glass of ONE colour from ONE factory. Any remaining glass pieces in that factory are moved to a central pool. Here are our thoughts on the positive and negative elements of each game in the Azul series. Azul What Azul does best: If you are looking for a crunchy abstract game with a large lean toward the puzzle category, Azul: Queen’s Garden could be a good fit for you.The starting player pulls Pane Pieces from the bag and places four of them on each Factory, and then places the starting player tile in the centre of the circle of Factories. On their turn a Player must do one of two actions: At the start of the game a number of Factories (circular disks) depending upon the number of players are put out in a circle in the centre of the table. A cardboard Glass Tower is assembled and placed near the Factories. This will be used to hold “broken” Pane Pieces during the game. Each player chooses a colour and takes the appropriate Player Board together with the 8 Pattern Strips. The Pattern Strips each show a column of 5 coloured spaces on which Pane Pieces will be placed during the game. The Player Boards are doubled sided and change how the final scoring is carried out. All players agree on which side of the board will be used for the game. The Pattern Strips, also doubled sided, are randomly placed as vertical columns above the Player Board. One of the Pattern Strips shows 2 joker spaces instead of coloured spaces and this Strip must be placed with the joker spaces face down. Each player places their Glazier pawn above their leftmost Pattern Strip. Here, for instance, there’s a glazier who limits which strips of the variable player board can be filled as they travel from left to right, forcing players to plan ahead to slot in as many panes as they can before the glazier is eventually reset to the left like a typewriter. The progressive movement of the glazier neatly counterbalances a combo system that makes filling in right-hand columns first more valuable, as any completed strips to the right of a newly-finished window add bonus points to that score, presenting the chance to set up game-winning combos with the right strategy. It's a notably different but no less interesting flow to Azul’s rewarding of adjacent tiles on a grid, and gives a nice structure and flow to each round. Each turn, a number of market tiles will be filled with four random transparent plastic tiles, drawn at random and in a possible five different colours. On a player’s turn they will select to take all the tiles of one colour from a market location and add them to one column in their player board, representing a stained glass window. Tiles must be placed on a spot of a matching colour and any extra tiles will be wasted, resulting in a deduction of points.

Summer Pavilion is also, in our opinion, the most beautiful of the three games. Why you may not like Azul: Summer Pavilion: Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra is the sequel to the incredibly popular Azul, from the same designer, Michael Kiesling, and the same publisher, Next Move Games. If you are looking for an abstract game that is straightforward without sacrificing the depth of strategy Azul Summer Pavilion could be a great choice for you.Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra (created by Michael Kiesling) is a standalone game for two to four players – it is not an expansion to Azul. Thematically, players are competing to create the most impressive stained-glass panels for the Portuguese palace of Sintra. In turn, players draft coloured glass from a central pool of glass factories to gradually complete their design. Your decisions are often skewed by what you think your rivals are trying to do, and the game offers a couple of end game bonus variants that increase replayability – in addition to the variability of your window design and the way tiles come out of the bag. The game has nice components and play moves along at a good pace without too much downtime.

In this way, Stained Glass of Sintra joins Queendomino as a follow-up to a Spiel des Jahres-winning game that builds on a simple gameplay hook with a slightly more complicated expansion of those ideas. The difference here is that where Queendomino and Kingdomino could be combined, the Azul games remain completely standalone, so there's not quite as much value in owning both. For anyone familiar with Azul, winner of the 2017 Spiel des Jahres award, the tile-drafting mechanic of Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra is instantly recognisable. What you do with your tiles, however, is a different story. Stained Glass of Sintra - The Game Sounds simple enough but, of course, there are constraints on both the drafting and the placement of tiles, and there are also bonuses to aim for when scoring panels and at the end of the game. And, of course, you’ll need to keep an eye on what your opponents are trying to do. Players compete to complete their stained glass windows. The window panels making up the player boards are double sided and modular. Players determine where they can place drafted tiles by moving their “glazier” (player marker) left to right down their window, using a turn to reset when necessary. What Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra does best: It is far easier to tell what is in each players’ best interest based on where their glaziers are on their board – there’s less fear in losing out on tiles you may need when you know that no one else can get them lest they lose points. Because of this, there is far less opportunities for players to be mean. However, it can still happen and can be quite punishing when it does.We’ve played all four and we can confirm that each are perfectly lovely in their own way. Yet, because they are each so similar to the other, we don’t feel that you need to have each game on your shelf.

If preferred, you may select ALL pieces of ONE colour from the central pool, and the first player to do so also claims the first player marker – but also takes a penalty. In the Azul game series, players will take turns drafting colored tiles from the center circles to their player board. When certain sets of tiles are collected and satisfy placement requirements on their board players are able to score points. If players draft more tiles than they need they must discard the leftovers — this causes them to lose points. Verdict For the Shelf: Azul (90% of the time) and Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra (10% of the time). Sintra is a valiant effort at a follow up and is a great game all on it’s own. When compared to the original Azul, however, Sintra is just a little bit too jumbled and not focused to be as good. Again, both games are top notch, fantastic games, Azul classic just has the advantage. In the latter case, you move your glazier to that panel and he starts the next turn there. Thus, gradually, your options diminish as your glazier approaches the rightmost panel. To give yourself more options, you can reset your glazier to the leftmost panel – but skip a turn for doing so.Player Count: Every game in the Azul universe is 2 – 4 players. They all use the same, trademark tile drafting system that scales incredibly well at that count and Azul vs Stained Glass of Sintra is no different. The translucent cough sweet appearance of the tiles aside, this drafting is where Sintra hews mostly closely to its predecessor. The rest of the game is a remix of sorts of Azul’s wall-tiling puzzle, spinning out its combo-building scoring and pattern-completion into a different yet familiar form.