Azul vs Azul: Summer Pavilion: Which Should You Buy?

Azul is the one I hand to people who insist they don't really do board games, because by round two they've usually forgotten they said it. You draft sets of tiles from shared piles and lay them on your board for points, and the catch is that everything you take shapes what's left for everyone else. So half of every turn is deciding what you're willing to hand your opponents, and sometimes you'll grab tiles you don't even want just to keep them out of the wrong hands. It's shapes and timing, full stop, and it's over in about 40 minutes.

Summer Pavilion keeps the drafting bones but stretches them. You're collecting diamond-shaped tiles from factory displays, then spending them to fill a hexagonal star, and placing a tile in the three-slot literally costs you three tiles. Each round one color goes wild so you can patch holes when the supply dries up, and you keep up to four leftovers between rounds instead of losing everything. The result is a game where you can actually breathe and plan a few moves ahead, and the cascading scoring feels great when a placement clicks into place. It's less about denying your opponent and more about building your own beautiful thing.

Neither of these will scare anyone off. Azul teaches in about two minutes, and the depth shows up right away rather than hiding behind a rulebook. It's rated for ages 8 and up and genuinely earns that. Summer Pavilion is also easy to teach in a few minutes, but there's more to hold in your head once you're playing (wilds, the save-up-to-four rule, and placement costs that scale with the slot number). It sits a notch heavier, Medium instead of Light-Medium.

The bigger first-game difference is emotional, honestly. New Azul players sometimes get a sour taste when someone dumps tiles on them and they eat a pile of negative points before they've figured out the timing. Summer Pavilion's wilds and saving rule soften that considerably, so a first game there tends to feel friendlier, even if the turns take longer to think through. If your crew bruises easily, that matters more than any weight rating.

Both games are stunners, though in different ways. Azul's resin tiles are so satisfying you'll fidget with them between turns, and the whole thing fits in that grab-it-by-the-front-door category of games you can play night after night. It's genuinely fantastic at two, where it turns slow and a little vicious in the best way. The knocks against it: there's basically no theme, and at four players a runaway leader can be hard to catch.

Summer Pavilion is gorgeous on the table too, and the placement puzzle has real depth that keeps rewarding repeat plays. Several reviewers now call it their favorite in the whole Azul line. But it plays slower than base Azul, often pushing past an hour with two careful thinkers, which surprises people expecting a breezy forty minutes. Some critics also grumble that it can feel like more Azul rather than a truly new game, and the central scoreboard is famously thin and flimsy. Players bring that last one up constantly, and they're not wrong.