Draft tiles from shared factory displays, place them into one staging row each round, and score when completed rows move onto your wall. The puzzle is about timing, denial, and surviving the floor-line penalties long enough to convert clean rows into explosive bonus scoring.

How to Play Azul

Setup

Each player takes a personal board with five staging rows, a wall grid, and a floor line. Place the score marker on 0. Fill the center with the correct number of factory displays for the player count, then place four random tiles on each factory. Put the remaining tiles in the bag and leave the box lid nearby for discarded tiles.

Round Structure

Azul is played over a series of rounds. Each round has three phases:

1. Draft tiles

On your turn, choose one factory display or the center of the table.

• If you draft from a factory, take all tiles of one color from that factory.

• Move every remaining tile from that factory into the center.

• If you draft from the center, take all tiles of one color there. The first player to take from the center also takes the first-player marker and places it on the leftmost empty floor space.

2. Place drafted tiles

All tiles you draft this turn must go into exactly one staging row on your board.

• A row may only hold one color this round.

• Row sizes run from 1 tile up to 5 tiles.

• You may place tiles only if the matching color is not already completed in that row's matching wall line.

• Any overflow tiles, or tiles you choose not to place legally, go to the floor line and will score as penalties.

3. Wall-tiling and cleanup

After all factories and the center are empty, players resolve their boards.

• Every full staging row moves exactly one tile to the matching color space in that wall row.

• All remaining tiles from that staging row are discarded to the box lid.

• Score the newly placed wall tile immediately based on orthogonal adjacency.

• Empty all floor tiles and apply floor penalties.

• Refill factories for the next round.

Scoring during the round

When a tile moves onto the wall:

• If it touches no other placed tiles orthogonally, it scores 1 point.

• If it is part of a horizontal line, score the full horizontal line length.

• If it is part of a vertical line, score the full vertical line length.

• If both directions exist, score both lines and count the placed tile in each line.

The floor line applies negative points at the end of the round. The standard penalty track is increasingly harsh from left to right, so repeated overflow can erase a strong drafting round.

End of the game

The game ends when at least one player completes a full horizontal row on their wall during the wall-tiling phase. Finish scoring that round for all players, then award end-game bonuses.

End-game bonuses

Award bonus points for:

• each completed horizontal row

• each completed vertical column

• each full set of all five tiles of one color

The player with the highest final score wins.

Record each player's final score after all round scoring and end-game bonuses. If final scores tie, use completed horizontal rows as the official tiebreak when available.

total_points is the authoritative recorded outcome. completed_rows is a diagnostic count captured only for the official completed-row tiebreak; it does not sum to total_points (per-round wall placement, floor penalties, and the row/column/color-set end-game bonuses all feed total_points and overlap, so the score does not decompose into separately recordable additive components). Record total_points as authoritative.