Base price: $29.
2 players.
Play time: ~20 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy directly!
Logged plays: 2 

Full disclosure: A review copy of Azure was provided by Bitewing Games.

I do enjoy a creation myth. I think there’s something exciting about theming your game in the mythological space (and I think Bitewing agrees, given that they’ve made an entire Mythos collection of games that have mythologies to them). There are plenty of others, though, from the immaculate Santorini to the less-well-known They Who Were 8 to that one Before There Were Stars that I really wanted to like more than I did. Players like existing in that space where their actions have some cosmic significance almost as much as players like the exact opposite and play games where they just work in a microcosm of their usual job, but on the weekend and in their free time. People are weird sometimes. But a good myth can draw you in, so let’s see if Azure reaches that bar.

In Azure, players gather qi and wisdom to impress the Four Auspicious Beasts. Ok, I was right. I was reading about these guys as I was writing this review because they seemed specifically familiar, and, yes, there are Digimon counterparts for them. Anyways, these guys can grant you power and abilities beyond your imagination with their favor, but you don’t really crave just power and influence: you want to use all the things you’ve gathered to ascend along the path of wisdom and achieve true understanding. That’s nice and less complicated anyways. So place stones, gather resources, and see where you’ll end up along the path. Can you beat your rival to the peaks of enlightenment?

Contents

• Setup
• Gameplay
• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Setup

The four Domains can be flipped and spun and shuffled however you like and then placed into a square. The scoreboard can be set aside:

The Mountains should be placed on the pictured spaces, and the Auspicious Beasts on top of them:

Each player gets fourteen common stones and a score marker. If you’re playing with the Gifted variant, give each player a Gifted Stone as well:

Separate the cards by color, and then take three of each. Shuffle the threes into a face-down Hidden Deck, and place the other decks face-up nearby.

Choose a player to start; they draw two cards from the hidden deck, and the other player draws three cards from the hidden deck. You should be ready to start!

If you’re playing with The Gifted variant, shuffle the Gifted Cards and choose one:

Gameplay

This one’s not too complicated! First to 25 wins. Each turn, you’ll place a stone and then collect some boons. To place a stone, choose a Domain and a space where you want to place a stone. For each boon (point or card) on the space, you’ll have to spend one card of that Domain’s color. That cost can be discounted by bonds! One card discount per stone of yours in that space’s same row and column, unless that stone is blocked by a Mountain. While you can lower the cost of a space to zero, if you are unable to place a stone, you lose immediately. So use your discounts wisely. If you’re playing with the Gifted Variant, you can spend an extra card or two of the same color to place your Gifted Stone and gain those benefits.

Once you’ve placed a stone, you collect the boons on the space. These can be cards or points! That’s always nice.

After doing that, you check the Auspicious Beasts! The Beasts can be guarded by stones (usually near their mountain, though it’s different for some of the Beasts). The first player to have two stones guarding a Beast gains that Beast’s favor and the Beast’s token. This usually results in a benefit of some kind, but be careful! If your opponent ever has more stones guarding the Beast’s mountain, they steal the favor away from you! You also lose the benefit which can mean losing points or cards, depending on the Beast.

Play continues until any player reaches 25 points! That player instantly wins. If any player cannot place a stone, well, they instantly lose.

Player Count Differences

Purely a two-player game, here.

Strategy

• Remember what your goal is, here. You want to get 25 points. You don’t win by having the favor of all the Beasts. You don’t win by having the most cards. These are super easy ways to get distracted, and the game is tight enough that if you get distracted, you can pretty quickly lose. Stay focused.
• Taking the Beasts can be nice, but they’re hard to get back once you lose them. To reclaim one you have to have explicitly more stones guarding that beast than your opponent, not the same number (unless you’re using a specific Gifted module). That makes it progressively more irritating to get them back every time, and it means your opponent can often stonewall you if they want to.
• The variable setup means that certain areas are going to be more or less useful to control. Watch out for spots on the board that are blocked by Mountains, for instance, since you won’t get the bond bonus from stones in the same row or column if the Mountains are in the way. This may mean that certain pathways on the board are easier to place on or more difficult, depending on the game. Generally, I always recommend having an inventory of the board in your mind before you get too deep into the game.
• It’s never a bad idea to see what you can get for free. Free is good, but it needs to be relevant to your goal. Just getting another red card isn’t useful; getting a red card and claiming the Favor of the Tortoise so that you can get a 6-point space more cheaply next turn is useful. The difference is important.
• While you can’t remove a player’s stones, you can steal the favor of one of the Beasts from them, which can often swing some points or cards. A 2- or 3-point swing can be a lot in a two-player game, but you can also steal the Favor of the Bird, which forces the player who had it previously to return cards from their hand to the corresponding decks. That might force them to take a worse move than they had planned for, or it might throw a wrench in their gears. Or it might do nothing, so pay attention to what they’re doing.
• The high-value point spaces are pretty worth it, but they require either a lot of cards or a lot of prep. Each space’s cost in cards is the number of boons minus the number of bonds (stones of yours in the same row or column not blocked by Mountains). So 7 points? Awesome. Love that. But you need 7 cards or a lot of bond to pull that off.
• If using the Gifted Module, remember that you only get one shot with that. Don’t place your double-bond or diagonal-bond stone somewhere where it’s not going to be useful, for instance. The Gifted Stone placement is pretty critical and your strategy should be to maximize its utility.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• The art is, of course, impeccable. Kwanchai Moriya and Brigette Indelicato are a dream team. The games look great without sacrificing anything from a graphic design perspective, which makes them great to look at and easy to play. That’s pretty much the dream.
• This one’s pretty easy to set up and play, which I appreciate. You just spin the boards a few times and prep the Hidden Deck, neither of which are too complicated. This also means that the game is very easy to replay, which I love for a two-player quick abstract. Santorini was my lunch game of choice for a while, so more games that have a similar feel are good.
• I like how the card play works. There’s an engine-building quality to the game in that the more stones you have nearby, the cheaper the spot is, and then you make up the gap with cards of the matching color. It’s interesting in that it’s most obviously reminiscent of, Splendor, but maps that vibe to a really neat abstract strategy game.
• My favorite thing about this game is like a good engine-builder, you’re always making progress towards the end of the game. You never remove stones, so there will always be a few spaces on the board that are likely getting cheaper with each play, and you’re getting more cards fairly often. Figuring out what cards to get when is part of the strategy, but I like that this has the “constant forward progression” idea that a good engine-building game should strive for.
• I like the Gifted Module. I think it’s a neat and compact way to give each player a fairly weighty choice that allows for some asymmetry without letting it dominate the game. That’s kind of ideal for a module that’s four cards and two stones, wouldn’t you say?

Mehs

• I’d have liked if the variability of the game extended to some of the Beasts, as well. They feel oddly similar in some ways (mostly the dragon and the tiger, who both give you points and are both obtained by having the most stones in their row and column). The bird and the tortoise are both wildly different and that’s pretty interesting.
• Why do scoreboards never have a 0, anymore? Starting off the board is always so weird, to me. This isn’t an Azure-specific gripe but it does happen here.
• I still don’t love that they keep expansion-only content in the base game rulebook. At best it’s annoying since it details content I don’t have and can confuse the player; at worst it’s an advertisement. Just … include that with the expansion content.

Cons

• I wish the boards were a bit sturdier or the stones were a bit flatter. Any jostling will get the stones vibrating a bit and this is not a game where it’s easy to restore the game state if something falls off or gets moved around. If the stones were a bit heavier or a bit flatter they’d be less prone to movement so I wouldn’t worry as much.

Overall: 8 / 10

Overall, Azure is a great little abstract game! It’s quick, too, which I appreciate: every turn you’re making progress towards the end of the game, and while there’s back-and-forth between players, you’re never able to force a player backwards or undo a ton of progress. That keeps the game from feeling stale. Azure itself boasts that there are 10000+ combinations of the boards, but that feels like conflating the number of combinations with replayability. Art-wise, Kwanchai Moriya and Brigette Indelicato are a dynamite team and doing some of the best work in the business. The cards are beautiful (and clear, so, good graphic design) and the board looks great from any angle. The most important thing, though, is that Azure is solidly fun. That slow rising as both players start advancing towards the goal could, in a worse game, feel like a stalemate waiting to break, but instead there’s a clever tension as you gain or lose the Favor of beasts or start getting cards where it’s more waiting for a player to make a break for it. If you go for it too early, you won’t have enough momentum to get you across the finish line and the other player will usurp you. Go too late, and by the time you get going, the other player’s won. It’s a simple tactic but a clever one, boosted by solid components and fantastic art. Lost? Well, you can reset quickly and start again, which is always the best part of a two-player game, for me. Almost all of my favorites are quick-play and quick-reset, so we can get right back into it (or just play for the whole of lunch). If you’re a fan of two-player abstracts, you’re motivated by good-looking games, or you just want to see a big tortoise with a snake for a tail, Azure will probably be right up your alley! It’s a neat one.

Looking for more great two-player games? Check out my Two-Player Games Hub for recommendations!

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