I’m always wary of board game sequels because all too often, they lose sight of what made the original great (I’m looking at you, Queendomino and King of New York).

The Pattern Strip now scores the points beneath it together with the points beneath any other completed Pattern Strip (identified by a Pane Piece on one of the positions) to the right of the one being scored.It may be the best selling board game of the last few years, with Next Move/Plan B reporting sales of above 325,000 copies even before that red SdJ Pommel was placed on the box. 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.

Whether its a quick game between rounds or an all day main event, the Goonhammer team can often be found pushing chits, cubes, and cards around a board game.When a game wins the prestigious Spiel des Jahres award, it is common practice for the publisher to produce a series of expansions to both capitalise on the success of the base game whilst maintaining the public’s interest in the game. Once a Strip is complete, immediately select one Pane from the strip to place in the first open spot below it on the Palace Board. Carefully pick where you sow and when you grow, as trees in the shadows are blocked from light, and from points. Illustrated by Chris Quilliams, players can expect to discover all new unique art and components in Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra including all new translucent window pane pieces, a tower to hold discarded glass panes, double sided player boards and window pane panels, in addition to many other beautiful components! I think those who like the more variable side of the board in Azul will like the variable setup here in Sintra, and I think that folks who like to have a bit more control or choice will like Sintra as well.

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. End of the game there are two options for scoring, each will get you more points to kind of off-set that negative you may incur along the way, or maybe just reward you for good play. 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. 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.One way is a simple multiplier, you take the color of glass you have the most of on the bottom of your player board and you multiply that times the number of completed (two pieces) windows on your player board. This makes you think about the value of moving the Glazier as then you will need to take a turn out to reposition it back to the left.

Each window has a static point value assigned to it on the bottom of the player board, you will score that many points, plus any points for windows to the right that have been completed previously.Usually, when it comes to remakes or sequels, there is one version of a game that is clearly better than the other. Azul and Sintra seem to have a similar core mechanism; grab the colors you want and push the leftovers into the middle. I loved the additional strategic considerations that are needed, and they multiple ways of scoring during and at the end of the game.