Azul: Queen’s Garden is out in retail stores this month
Bloomin’ brilliant.
The newest entry in the Azul series – Azul: Queen’s Garden – is being released into retail stores this month.
Originally stated to have a late 2021 release date, Azul: Queen’s Garden is now expected to be released at the end of April. The upcoming board game made an appearance at last year’s Essen Spiel convention, the largest tabletop gaming event in the world, with Dicebreaker having a hands-on preview of Queen’s Garden at the convention.
The latest release in the popular beginner board game series, Queen’s Garden sees players competing to create the most beautiful gardens possible for the Queen of Sintra. As the royal gardeners, the players are tasked with landscaping their boards with various flowers, trees and architectural features. Similar to the original Azul, Queen’s Garden has players taking turns to draft and place tiles over a series of rounds. On their turn, players can choose to draft tiles from the available pool, with the option to take all tiles of the same colour or symbol from an available flat tile, except any that are entirely identical to one another.
Players can then place one of their newly acquired tiles onto their garden boards, as long as they can afford to play them. The cost of placing a tile is represented by its symbol, with the more expensive tiles depicting a greater number of elements within its symbol. Players will need to spend an amount of tiles of the same symbol or colour equal to the cost of a tile in order to put it onto their garden board. The more expensive tiles will provide players with more points during the round scoring phase, which happens once all players have decided to pass, and the end game scoring phase.
During the round scoring, players gain points for having certain types of tiles within their garden, with the scoring tile type for each round being displayed on the sundial shown on the main board. At the end of the game, players will only score points for groups of at least three or more tiles with matching colours or symbols that have been placed together. This means that players will need to balance their opportunities for scoring at the end of every round, with the chance to gain more points at the end of the game. Whichever player scores the most points by the end of the game is named the winner.
Azul: Queen’s Garden was designer by Michael Kiesling, the creator of the original Azul – alongside its other sequels Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra and Azul: Summer Pavillion – and the co-designer of the two-player board game Tikal.
Plan B Games is set to publish Queen’s Garden, with the studio being responsible for releasing all of the previous entries in the series and both Century board game trilogies.
Azul: Queen’s Garden is set to be published on April 29 at a retail price of £42 ($55).