Azul Kids

A game we tried out at UKGE which isn’t available yet.

I absolutely love Azul, and it’s one of our go-to games to play with new gamers. So I was really curious to see the kids’ version and how it would play.

I played it with my 7-year-old, and we only had time to try the Apprentice level, but you can see the rules for both Apprentice and Master.

In Apprentice mode, you each choose a board from a variety of different designs. These form shapes such as a butterfly, parrot, or flower from smaller coloured shapes, for example red squares and green diamonds.

Similar to the original Azul, on your turn you can take all the tiles of a single colour from one of the supply bowls. Any tiles of a different colour in the same bowl are pushed into the central bowl. Unlike the original Azul, there is no penalty for choosing to take from the central bowl once it becomes available.

You then place those tiles on your board. If you took more than you need, you pass the spare tiles to the player on your left. You keep going, refilling the bowls once they are all empty, until someone fills their board.

It’s very simple to pick up and teaches the basic mechanic of choosing tiles, while also encouraging you to be tactical about when to take them so that you don’t end up with too many. It is very simple, so Hayley wasn’t super enthused, but I found it quite relaxing, and the target age is 5+.

The Master mode makes things slightly harder by separating your board into smaller “drawings”. You can only place tiles within one drawing per turn, meaning you’ll need to be more careful about what you take.

It’s definitely a way to introduce Azul mechanics much earlier than I think you could play the original Azul. The pieces are just as tactile as those in the original game, and the variety of board designs will likely appeal to a younger audience. I think the age recommendation is probably about right, but more experienced young gamers might find it a little too simple, in which case you could skip straight to the Master rules.