Plan B Games | Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra | Board Game | Ages 8+ | 2 to 4 Players | 30 to 45 Minutes Playing Time

Product Information

Both sides require different considerations and change your strategy slightly. When playing with side A you are more concerned with clustering completed Palace Board spaces around ornaments. When playing with side B of the Palace Board you are trying to focus on a particular colour of tile and to remove as many pattern strips as possible to maximise the end game bonus. 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. The big question of if Azul Stained Glass of Sintra is better than the original is a tough one to answer for everyone at once. The additional decisions driven by tweaks to losing points, the end game scoring and the inclusion of passing makes it more of a “gamer’s game”. Due to this the instant unbox and play factor the original excelled at, that simplicity of just take and use, is lost. Both are phenomenal abstract puzzles but with extremely similar mechanics. Due to this is isn’t possible to recommend owning both – neither being a killer of the other. Owning one or the other would hold a good spot in any collection. If you enjoyed the original or you are new to the world of Azul, Stained Glass of Sintra should very much be on your “to play” list though! With that health and safety announcement complete you can start getting the game ready to play. The Setup is a little more involved than Azul but not too bad. Place the scoreboard on the table, set out round factory discs according to player count and place the glass tower in the play area. The game in play. The glazier pawns are a new concept in Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra and provide an extra constraint to consider as tiles can only be placed below or to the right of them.

The other change that we love is the addition of bonus points based on a specific colour of tile each round. This adds another dimension to decisions of which panes to complete first. You may want to delay completing a pattern strip if you can see it will trigger bonus points in the next round. My daughters are very focused on maximising these bonus points. When they happen to complete a pattern strip which yields 4 or 5 bonus points, they like to make sure everyone knows about it as they loudly count their points! 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. You must then allocate your glass to matching positions in your design. Your design is divided into vertical panels, and all glass must go to the same panel. Any excess pieces are treated as breakages – for which you accumulate penalties. Your choice of panel is indicated by a glazier token, and you can only place glass into the panel your glazier is currently working on, or a panel to the RIGHT of that panel.Each round a new color tile is wild which gives you something to plan for and work towards to help complete valuable sections on your board. 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. To win you must apply all your skill to complete stained-glass patterns to earn points. The player with the most points by the end of the game wins. Set Up Over the course of six rounds players will draft tiles to create a summer pavilion, carefully avoiding wasting any supplies. Each of the six tile colors takes a turn being wild during a round, helping players complete sections on their player board. Players earn progressively more points as they place tiles and begin to fill in each section on their board. Bonuses are earned for surrounding sections of the board and for completely filling in stars at the end of the six rounds. What Azul: Summer Pavilion does best: If a section of the design is completed, it is scored and then turned over to reveal a different combination of colours. If completed a second time, it is scored again and then discarded into the box.

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 Larry (1 play): I don’t really care for abstract designs, so I was never a big fan of the original Azul. Sintra is more interesting for me, because of the intricacies of the scoring rules and the tension between working on the left-most columns (because it’s more efficient) or completing the right-most columns early (because that lets you score them multiple times). However, at the end of the day, it’s still an abstract and that’s just not the kind of game I’ll ever love. So for me, Sintra > Azul, and I’ll play either if asked, but I’m just as happy staying away from both. With the introduction of the glazier pawn, the columns into which you can place tiles are limited unless you skip a turn to reset the pawn. You’ll also need to plan ahead carefully to ensure you are getting the most points out of every column you complete, timing it to complete on the right turn for bonus points and also trying to make the most of gaining extra points for columns already completed. To add even more variability, each column is double sided and flips over once complete, so the game setup with be very different every time. 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.Side B scores points based on the number of completed “windows” (i.e. where a Pattern Strip has been completed twice during the game and discarded). The player chooses one colour and multiplies the number of times that colour occurs in the completed windows by the number of completed windows. Is it different enough to warrant owning both Azul and Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra? For me the answer is absolutely! I love both games and I feel both offer a different experience. If you like Azul I think you are likely to like Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra too. I would suggest getting Azul first if you don’t have either as the rules are simpler and easier to learn.

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: The original is perfectly simple. With straightforward and easily understood rules, this is the least overwhelming in the series. It doesn’t try to get too cute with mechanics and that’s the beauty of it. Azul released two years ago and took the board gaming hobby by storm. The sequel, Azul Stained Glass of Sintra, has recently been released by Next Move Games. Designed by Michael Kiesling, with art from Chris Quilliams, this time around 2 – 4 players will be constructing windows with colourful glass panes. Taking around 30 – 40 minutes to play, the tile placement mechanics have been shaken up somewhat. However, is there enough of a change to warrant owning both this and the original? Let’s find out! Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra should take around 40-50 minutes for a complete four-player game. Final Thoughts on Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra

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: All players now share a score board instead of having one on their personal board. This is better in my view as it is easier to see where everyone is at and any applicable penalties. It also has prompts to remind players how bonus points are earned for each side of the Palace Board. Summer Pavilion is also, in our opinion, the most beautiful of the three games. Why you may not like Azul: Summer Pavilion: 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.