I’m enjoying my new Fridays. I’m home an hour earlier than I used to be. Which is real nice. But last night that extra hour was put to good use by having a bbq. Over my cheeseburger I was watching the season finale of The Big Bang Theory season 11. I was well into The Flash when Jonathan phoned asking if I wanted to meet up and try his latest arrival Azul. I jumped at the chance to try a game I was keen to try and also to be playing it with a good friend.

When Azul came out last year there was a lot of buzz around the game. So it had made the radar of both Jonathan and myself. We have been known to enjoy the odd abstract game or two. There are one or two in our collections. I had asked another friend Scott to bring his copy to the expo at the end of the month for both of us to try. However an opportunity (one that I missed) came up for Jonathan to get a copy. That copy arrived mid week, and hence the phone call last night.

As usual at The White Lion we started off having a little chat semi board game related over our pints of Thatchers, before learning how to play Azul.

I really liked the production values for the game. The plastic pieces have a nice feel to them. The player boards and factory circles are cardboard, but really great quality. Love the colourful design of the pieces. I can see why people joked online about playing the game with starbursts, they do kind of come to mind when looking at the pieces.

Like Santorini and Onitama the actual mechanics are fairly simple. But this simplicity hides what is actually a deep strategic game. There are some really nice decisions to make during the game, such as do you take a particular tile to screw over your opponent and miss a scoring opportunity for yourself? Or do you take a tile now to set up a future high scoring round or do you go for a score this round that won’t be as high.

And this played really well as a 2 player game, and is from reports also fun at its higher player counts. Which I’d like to try it at. Also the game played surprisingly quickly too. Which is nice. I find this just adds to the one more game syndrome. Before you know it you have ended up playing the game a lot more times in that session than planned.

Jonathan won our initial game. But our second game I smashed him. And it all turned on one decision that he made during the game to screw me over instead of furthering his own plans. That next turn I scored all five lines in some nice combos, while Jonathan had crippled his own scoring. Which set me up nicely to continue scoring big and get the win.

Guess what? I liked this game a lot. Yeah I’ll be picking up a copy at some point sooner than later.

After our games we finished off our beverages with more chat about life the universe and everything. It’s a shame we didn’t record these because I think especially this end one would have been interesting to folks.

BBQ, playing a a great game with a friend, great conversation, does the start to a weekend get better than this?