Player action, place a tile or a garden expansion – As an alternative to acquiring tiles, players could either place a tile or an expansion. In both cases, you could only place one or the other in your garden and you should pay the corresponding price. Firstly, there’s a wheel in the middle of the shared board that dictates which three tiles score at the end of each round and their respective point values. It will give you a mix of three colours or symbols and it is definitely worthwhile shooting for them in each round to maximise your score. Drafting also comes with its own challenges. Players can draft tiles for free to their storage area, however, to place them in the garden, they will need to pay the price of the tile: pay the value displayed on that tile by discarding other tiles of the same colour or type from their storage. That means that even though you may draft four or five tiles in the same round, only a fraction of them, if any, will end up in your garden. The scoring systems of Queens Garden are also different to what I am used to in Azul titles. Where the original and Summer Pavilion score as you place pieces and again at the end of the game, Queens Garden scores at the end of each round and then at the end of the game but both scoring phases are very unique to the series. To achieve the magnificent goal of pleasing the king, players are tasked to draft and arrange beautiful plants, trees, and ornamental features represented by colorful tiles that are a signature of the Azul series. Unboxing And Storage:

Tokens and Garden expansions. The first setup requires the players to unpunch all the garden expansions and the tokens first. This juggling of both strategic and tactical aspects, alongside spatial play and pattern-building, is rich and engaging. There’s a lot to consider at every stage of the turn yet, as the game progresses, you won’t feel boxed in by your earlier decisions. Even the draft has interesting repercussions as garden tiles aren’t flipped face up until they’re clear of drafted hexes. So taking a hex you want might inadvertently create an opportunity for the following player. It is important to remind that the price of a tile should be always reduced by one as the one you are placing counts to cover the placing price. Understanding the cost is quite important as, for example, you do not need to pay any additional tiles to place those with a tree pattern as their cost is one. The cost could be covered by any combination of tile/ garden expansion/ Joker as far as there are no duplications and each of them counts as one when used to pay a cost, disregarding the pattern they are showing. The tiles used to pay the cost are discarded into the tile tower and not added to the bag.The game ends suddenly, so if you aren’t paying attention, you can get caught completely unaware. You must always be watching to know just how much longer the game is likely to go on. 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.

Starting from the first player, each player could only perform one of four actions choosing among: acquire tiles and garden expansions, place a tile, place a garden expansion, and pass. The jokers will need to be placed in any of the 12 spaces on the storage board. Player markers are placed on the square “15” on the scoring board and the single hexagonal marker (evaluation marker) is positioned on his icon on the left of the scoring board. First Player Actions Player and evaluation wooden markers could be stored in the small slot with “AZUL” printed onto it and all other tokens including the first player marker have a nice space behind the fountain boards. Tiles And Tile Tower Queen’s Garden plays out in four rounds. However players can choose to pass and end their participation in the round when either they can’t or do not wish to continue. Rounds continue until all players have passed. Why You May Not Like Azul Queen’s Garden:Queen’s Garden is also quite a bit heavier than the previous four games due to all of the drafting and placement restrictions. This leads to a much longer play time and Queen’s Garden outstaying its welcome. (All our games lasted 70+ minutes.) Unlike the other Azuls, Queens Garden’s drafting starts out as one pool to draft from and steadily increases as more tiles are taken, rather than all pools being available from the start. This simple change changes the feel of the drafting quite a bit, akin to Seven Wonders Duel, taking something you want may lead to you revealing something your opponent desires. The modular boards make the game fiddly in a way the other two are not as you will flip and remove window panels throughout the game. This often results in bumping and disrupting your placed tiles if you aren’t careful. Though players are given points each round for having certain types of tiles in their garden, they’re scored at the end of the game based on how they’ve placed those tiles, with players only earning points for groups of at least three tiles that have either matching colours or symbols. This means that players are unlikely to win if they aim for the round bonuses only, instead they will need to consider how they’re going to create high scoring groups of tiles within their garden. Winning at Queen’s Garden requires a careful balance of round scoring and end of game scoring, which makes for an incredibly compelling gameplay loop which is further spiced up by the randomness of tile drawing and which tiles your opponents decide to take. Azul: Queen’s Garden proves that the franchise still has plenty of ground to cover and delights to offer players, despite this being the fourth entry in a surprisingly simple series. Now, here’s where Azul: Queen’s Garden takes a hard left away from Azul as we know it… Rather than placing hexagons directly into your garden, you have to pay for them. The cost for any hexagon (including any garden expansion, based on the printed space) is the same as the value of pips on the hexagon – to be paid in either identical-value or colour hexes, or jokers. As with drafting no hexagon that is identical to the one being played can be used, and players can’t mix the colour/pattern currency. So for example, to play a six value blue hexagon, you’ll need to play either five other blue hexagons or five other six-value hexagons. Oddly, the cost includes the chip you wish to place (which is then placed in the garden) whilst any other chips are discarded into the tower to be re-used later.