Azul: Summer Pavilion

Category: Drafting

Designer: Michael Kiesling

Publisher: Next Move Games

Year Published: 2019

Players: 2-4

Playing Time: 30-60 minutes

To Play or Not To Play: Play

Remember when I reviewed Azul a few weeks ago? A game that has sold over 2 million copies and won the Spiel des Jahres award in 2018? Yeah, most people don't really need to hear my opinion on that game. I wrote it more as a calibration tool for new readers: read my opinion on a well-known game to gauge how valuable my thoughts on more obscure games might be.

But the main reason I wrote it was so that I could reference that review for this one! How do you review an Azul spin-off game without referencing the original? Enough introduction, let's dive into a mountain of diamond-shaped tiles!

4 players sit down to a game of Azul: Summer Pavilion!

At its core, Azul: Summer Pavilion is almost identical to Azul. Players draft tiles from circular factories and place them on their board to create pretty patterns. The big difference is that instead of a 5x5 grid of square tiles, you have these pinwheels of colored diamond-shaped tiles. But you'll also notice some features are absent: there's no staircase or smashed tiles row, and there's an entire extra board in the center of the table with the factory ring.

Let's start at the beginning: drafting. Drafting is mostly the same as Azul. You select a factory disc and take all of the tiles of a selected color, then push the remainder into the center. Or if you're not the first player, you can select the leftover tiles in the center and take all the tiles of a certain color from that collection. But Summer Pavilion adds two twists that make the game really interesting. The first is that after you take your tiles, you don't have to assign them to a location. You just create a pile of drafted tiles near your board, and you can put off figuring out how best to use them until after the drafting phase is finished.

The second has to do with that extra board. Near the top, there's a track numbered 1-6. Above each number is a colored diamond that matches one of the six tile patterns in the game. This is the round track, and each round the designated tile pattern is "wild." This means that you can use it as a tile of any color to help you place tiles onto your board (more on that later). It also means that when you're drafting, you take all the tiles of one pattern plus one tile of the wild pattern if one is available. Important note: you're not allowed to select the wild pattern as your color of choice. If purple is wild and there are two purple tiles on a factory, you cannot take them both. You have to pick a different color and take one of the purple tiles, while the other gets moved to the center.

A close-up view of the round track and the beginning of the scoring track for Azul: Summer Pavilion.

In both games, the second phase is placement. Azul's placement is pretty minimal: you're either able to place a tile in a row, or you're not, and then you score points accordingly. But in Summer Pavilion, you have a myriad of choices. You get to look at your pile of drafted tiles and decide where and how to use them. You pick a space on one of the pinwheels, select the requisite number of tiles (some combination of natural and wilds), then place one of the natural tiles in the spot and discard the rest.

Like normal Azul, you score more points for placing tiles adjacent to other tiles, so you're incentivized to build your pinwheels in sequence. So your first tile is worth 1 point, and then if you place a second one next to that first one, it'll be worth 2 points, and then the third one will be 3, etc. However, if you place your second tile away from the first point, it'll also only be 1 point. And then if you place a third tile between the two so that you now have 3 in a row, that'll be worth 3. Sometimes you may get stuck playing them that way, but you will get more points if you can place them in sequence.

Different spaces on the pinwheel tiles cost different numbers of tiles. The four that are adjacent to other pinwheels cost 1, 2, 3, or 4 tiles, arranged clockwise in order, while the two tiles that extend to the outside edges of the board cost 5 or 6.

The numbers in each space tell you how many tiles you need to spend to place a tile there. So if you want to place a tile in the Yellow 5 space, you need to have 5 yellow tiles. One gets placed on the board, and the other four get discarded, much like in basic Azul.

Completing a full pinwheel gets you a bunch of bonus points depending on the color. A purple pinwheel gets you 20 points, for example, while a red pinwheel is only 14. The Dark Blue pinwheel in the center operates slightly differently. There are no dark-blue tiles. Instead, you can use any color of tiles to place in the center pinwheel . . . but you can only use each color once. So if you put a yellow tile in the 1 spot, you can't later use four spare yellow tiles to place another yellow tile in the 4 spot.

In addition to victory points, placing tiles will sometimes earn you extra bonuses too. Between the central pinwheel and the perimeter ones are six beige spaces with a circle image (representing a column) and between each pair of perimeter pinwheels is a statue. When you have placed four tiles to completely surround the beige space, you claim the bonus. Each column gets you one bonus tile and each statue gets you two. What's a bonus tile? I'm so glad you asked!

The extra board has this large pinwheel that stores 10 extra tiles.

Whenever you claim a bonus, you get to take your bonus tiles from the large pinwheel on the extra board. These tiles get added to your supply and immediately replaced. So if you're trying to get a 4th yellow tile and you're unable to draft one during the drafting phase, you may be able to snag one from the bonus board.

There's a third bonus, which gives you three extra tiles! Whenever you fill both the 5 and 6 spaces on one of the perimeter pinwheels, you get to claim the window bonus. These are challenging, but essential for claiming that complete pinwheel bonus!

In the original Azul, all players could place their tiles and score simultaneously. But in Summer Pavilion, two players could be competiting for the same bonus tile. To manage that conflict, placement is done in turn order. Starting with the player with the 1st player token, each player places one tile on their board and scores the accompanying points. If they can claim a bonus, then they take their bonus tile(s) immediately and add them to their drafted pile. Then they replenish the bonus spaces from the bag. This adds an extra timing element to the game: do you claim your bonus early to get a useful tile, or do you delay to see if more valuable tiles come out later after other players claim their bonuses?

Eventually, you'll have placed most of your tiles. But you may find yourself with one or two extra that you don't have a good use for. Rather than forcing you to make suboptimal plays to avoid losing points, Summer Pavilion lets you store up to four tiles at the corners of your player board to use in the next round. This lets you plan for the future, and can be crucial for trying to snag those 5 and 6 spots if your drafting plan goes south.

Like base Azul, Summer Pavilion offers a few end-game scoring bonuses. I already mentioned the completed pinwheels, which are worth between 12 and 20 points depending on color. There are also bonuses for covering all seven spaces on the board for each number from 1 to 4. If you manage to cover all the "1" spaces, you get 4 points, 8 points for the "2"s, 12 for the "3"s and 16 for the "4"s. In order to win, you're going to need to strategically target some of these bonus. But you can't do it all because there's just not that much time in the game.

Look at that tower rising above the table! It adds such presence to the game!

The last of the changes lies in production design. Azul's biggest selling point is the beautiful, delectable tiles. Are Summer Pavilion's tiles equally mouth-watering? Not quite. The tiles are made of the same high-quality plastic, so they look and feel fantastic. However, the geometric designs on the tiles are simpler with less contrast. It's really easy to tell the different color tiles apart, and I think the choices for which tiles have designs and which are solid were intentional to minimize hardship for folks with color-blindness. I just miss the vibrant black-and-teal or blue-and-white patterns of the original.

Another new production decision is the red tower, clearly modeled after the tower at the Pena National Palace. It's pretty simple: just some thin folded cardboard with the design printed on the outside. But it serves a functional role in the game. When you place tiles, you'll usually have to discard some to pay for them. The discarded tiles go into the tower until the bag is empty. Then you dump the tower's contents back into the bag and continue playing. The base game didn't have anything like this, so you usually would store the tiles in the box lid, but it was awkward to pour the tiles from the lid back into the bag. Now, you get the satisfying plunk of tossing tiles into the tower, and then the wonderful sound clinking tiles as you pour the full tower back into the bag!

Sumer Pavilion shares a lot of DNA with Azul, but with some subtle, and not-so-subtle, changes. The elephant in the room is complexity. Summer Pavilion is significantly more complex than basic Azul. You have a lot more options for where to use your drafted tiles, you have more decisions to make on your turn, and figuring out when and how to use your "wild" tiles each round is surprisingly challenging. It doesn't seem that complicated on the surface, but my first couple games were really tough. For some reason, my brain just struggled to formulate any sort of strategy. After a couple games, everything clicked into place and now it's really fun. Just one of those weird things, I guess!

Summer Pavilion is also a very different experience at different player counts. With 2 players, you'll usually see all the tiles in the bag once, but you'll likely only refill the bag just before the sixth round. With 4, you'll empty and refill the bag many times. This means that different strategies are more or less viable in larger games. Like, in 2- or even 3- player games, it's really hard to complete one pinwheel. If you see a player going for one, it's usually best to stay out of their lane, or draft specifically to block them rather than drafting to try and make a pinwheel of the same color. But in a 4-player game, two players can and will pinwheels of the same color.

Ultimately, it's an Azul game at heart, and while scoring is a little weird and the bonus tiles add an extra flourish of gameplay, the core is largely the same. In some ways, you may find this game easier than base Azul! You don't have to commit your tiles until after you've drafted them, which makes the drafting feel a little less desperate. This isn't Star War: Rebellion or Churchill. It's a family Euro game designed for a slightly older, slightly more experienced audience.

To that end, I absolutely think you should play Summer Pavilion. If you like Azul but are feeling a little bored by it, Summer Pavilion injects some energy into the game. If you're an experienced gamer who likes more complex games, then Summer Pavilion provides more interesting decisions to sink your teeth into. And if you're a newcomer to the hobby . . . well, you should try Azul first, but I think Summer Pavilion is a great bellweather for your personal taste for complexity. It's a step up from Azul without being an overwhelming storm of cards, pieces, and tokens. I cannot say that Azul: Summer Pavilion is a game everyone should play, but if you're the type of person who reads board game reviews for fun, you should give Summer Pavilion a try.

Thanks as always for reading! These past few reviews have laregely been focused on lighter, family-friendly games, mostly as a way for me to get back into the swing of publishing these reviews again. But I'm really excited for next week's review, where I'll finally tackle something heavier, more complex, and more thematic. Until then, please follow me @ToPlayOrNot on Instagram or @chriskizer@kind.social on Mastodon for any and all updates!