Bengaluru

A good formula with a twist

Arjun Sukumaran

Updated:23rd Nov, 2019 at 6:33 AM

BENGALURU: Azul has been one of the bigger hits in the board gaming world in recent years. It’s fun, it’s tactile, and it’s accessible enough that you can play it with most people. Success inevitably leads to sequels, and so we’re taking a look at the third game in the Azul series, Summer Pavilion.

In Summer Pavilion, like the other games in the series, players will take turns drafting tiles from a central pool until all the tiles are gone. Unlike the other games, though, you don’t place those tiles immediately — they stay in reserve until the scoring phase at the end of the round. During that phase, players once again take turns placing those tiles onto your board in order to complete one of seven star patterns. Each star requires six tiles to be placed in order to be completed, and each tile you place will score you points based on how many tiles it’s connected to. Six stars are each associated with a particular colour, while the seventh requires one tile of each colour to be placed.

There’s enough in the above paragraph to assure you that yes, this is clearly an Azul game. However, let’s start talking about what Summer Pavilion does differently, starting with how you place those tiles. In order to place a tile into the #3 spot of the blue star, you need to discard three blue tiles from your personal supply (one of which will actually go onto the board). It’s easier to do lower-numbered spaces, but in order to complete stars and get the big points, you’re going to need a lot of tiles, which brings us to Summer Pavilion’s biggest departure from the Azul formula — wildcard tiles.

In each of Summer Pavilion’s six rounds, one of the colours is marked as the wildcard colour for that round. This has a couple of effects — first, you can no longer collect that colour as you would normally. Instead, you can take a single wildcard tile in addition to other tiles you take on your turn (assuming, of course, that there was one to take from that location). Secondly, as you might expect, wildcard tiles can be used along with other colours in order to pay for tile placement. This is a great addition that really changes the feel of the drafting phase — now you might choose a suboptimal location to draft tiles from just because it gets you the wildcard you need to complete something else.

More than any of the other games in the series, Summer Pavilion offers you the chance to pull a rabbit out of your hat and have a crazy chain-reaction kind of turn. For example, there are statues, pillars and windows printed on your player boards and, if you completely surround them with tiles, you get to take bonus tiles from a secondary board; potentially providing the impetus to chain into something else. Also, at the end of the game, you’ll score bonus points based on which of the stars you completed, as well as points for finishing all the #1, #2 and #3 spaces on your board — more balls to juggle, more variables to consider, and a delightful puzzle to solve.

In conclusion, Azul is still the more elegant game and is still going to be the game you pull off the shelf to play with new (or relatively new) gamers; it’s a wonderful ambassador for the hobby. However, Summer Pavilion is an amazing step-up from Azul, in terms of depth and complexity. If you’ve played Azul quite a few times and you’re looking for something a bit more elaborate, Summer Pavilion is an excellent game and a worthy successor.