Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra

Taking its cue from the original Azul, Stained Glass of Sintra (from the same designer) has a similar flavour, but a rather different implementation. In the original game you are mosaic artists; here you are glaziers. In both games the theme is almost an irrelevance: this is an abstract game, really, albeit one with more than a modicum of interaction.

At the start of each round, different-coloured glass pieces are placed in a circle of factory floor tiles, and on your turn you choose a factory and take all of the tiles of a single colour on it. Any glass left over slides into middle of the circle, which effectively becomes a new factory once there are any tiles present. You can take from the centre, but the first person to do so is hit with a penalty point. On the other hand, taking this penalty does also mean you’ll start first in the next round, which can be advantageous…

With the glass you’re constructing windows, so let’s look at those. Everyone has their own series of column-shaped windows in front of them, aligned into a row. You also have a single worker piece representing your glazier – you can only work on one window at a time, so when you take glass pieces you have to make sure the glazier is present in a window where they’re needed – but the glazier will only move from left to right, so once it’s reached your right-most window, it costs you a turn to move it back to a window of your choosing – ideally, the left-most, so you maximise the opportunities to glaze before returning the worker to the start again! Beware also that taking tiles you cannot actually fit into a window, discarding them instead, carries penalties – potentially rather punitive ones, knocking you back down the score track.

Your goal, then, is to glaze all of your windows. Once a window is fully glazed it scores points – we’ll come to how momentarily – and the window is emptied and flipped over, giving you a new glazing challenge. Once the second side is completed, that window is removed from the game.

Timing is everything in Sintra, because how much a window scores depends on what colour glass it has, and the round in which you complete it. At the start of the game tiles are randomly assigned to each round denoting the bonus for scoring that colour at that time, so for example a potential haul of points in round three, if missed, could then score you a pittance in any subsequent rounds. There’s also some end-game scoring depending on how many windows you completed, which is also tracked in front of you: a completed window fills a space on your board, and adjacently-filled spaces score points – the more adjacent the better. After a set number of rounds the glazier with the most points is the winner!