The simple, yet elegant, nature of the Glazier dictating where you can place tiles, and allowing you to essentially “skip” your turn changes the math of the game. Since you score the completed Strip and all of the completed Strips to its right, starting with the right Strips and working your way back to the left is a great strategy, but can be tricky because you will be Resting your Glazier more often. That said there are some significant differences with the way in which you are able to place pieces on your player board along with the Glazier function which when taken with the scoring method changes the gameplay.

Sintra is a nice variation on a theme that I would be happy to play, but in the long run Azul owns a permanent spot in the collection. Gameplay wise, Sintra does feel to have a bit more depth than Azul, but sometimes I do wonder if that depth is an illusion? 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. If preferred, you may select ALL pieces of ONE colour from the central pool, and the first player to do so also claims the first player marker – but also takes a penalty.

If color blindness is an issue, the fine folks at Next Move have tried to fix that for you with a couple of different options, including textures on the pieces and a backside of the factories that has a space to lay out the pieces in specific spots denoting which pieces they are. In this beautiful and unique game, plant and shape the ever-changing forest as you cultivate your seeds and your strategy.

If it’s a factory, the remaining pieces go to the middle of the offering, you then place it in a row, all the tiles that you can. Maybe that’s what happening here, who knows, maybe there is something else in Portugal for us to cover or enclose and we just haven’t seen it yet. Based on Rob’s review of Sintra, it seems like the tension comes from puzzling out how cram as many actions into 6 rounds as possible. The player chooses one colour and multiplies the number of times that colour occurs in the completed windows by the number of completed windows.Every time a window is finished (each one can be finished twice), you score points for it and every completed window to the right of it. What I mean by that is that it feels like it came first and when it was presented to the developers they chopped it up a bit and gave us the perfectly streamlined Azul that we got last year. Much like Azul, the experience is improved with fantastic components as well as the puzzly gameplay. However, doing this may put her at risk of having to take unwanted tiles, because once she has reset her pawn, she cannot “pass” again until it has moved off of the far-left column once more.

As a glass artisan, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to demonstrate your exquisite abilities for King and country. Your work on the royal palace of Evora is complete and now you and one to three other players (2-4 total) have been asked to adorn the windows of the chapel of the Palace of Sintra in Portugal. To set up the game, a number of circular displays are placed in the middle, and 4 colored tiles begin on each. Sintra is a Portuguese city in the foothills of the Sintra Mountains near the capital city of Lisbon. There are times where your Glazier hasn’t moved more than two windows and yet, the offerings for you to take are not what you need or want, so you delay by passing, making the other players take those glass shards, but this can also put you behind in terms of number of glass taken and thus slow you down so you really don’t want to do that unless you absolutely have to.Side A scores points for the number of Pane Pieces placed on the Player Board when Pattern strips have been completed. The reason being that there are added elements of strategy that make it more compelling to a strategy hawk like myself.

Secondly, when you complete a panel, you score points for that panel AND re-score any previously completed panel to the right of that panel. Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra is the sequel to the incredibly popular Azul, from the same designer, Michael Kiesling, and the same publisher, Next Move Games. I find that the broken glass track is particularly brutal in two player games where it is possible to manoeuvre your opponent into picking up far more Pane Pieces than they can place.Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra offers a different experience to the original Azul, which may be slightly more challenging and suited to experienced players. 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. Take your trees through their life-cycle, from seedling to full bloom to rebirth, and earn points as their leaves collect energy from the revolving sun’s rays. Your decisions are often skewed by what you think your rivals are trying to do, and the game offers a couple of end game bonus variants that increase replayability – in addition to the variability of your window design and the way tiles come out of the bag.