Azure - Designer Diary :: From Fish to Photos

If you've ever seen photos of the colorful buildings of Cinque Terre, Italy, you will immediately recognize the inspiration for Azure. About 10 years ago, I was lucky enough to visit and spend a few days in Cinque Terre, and it’s been an experience that has stuck with me ever since. 

Riomaggiore

In Azure, you are a photographer travelling the Azure trail, a hiking trail connecting the five colorful villages of Cinque Terre. You snap as many pictures as you can of the beautiful, pastel-colored buildings along the trail, hoping to collect the best collection of photos in your tour group. However, you can’t travel the whole trail in one day, so you agree to swap different photos with your tour friends!

In Azure, draft beautiful picture cards, place them in your tableau, and build the highest scoring panorama - using the photos your opponents choose for you!

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Azure was not always about Cinque Terre - it was first about fish!

Azure began as a contest submission for The Game Crafter’s Table Presence Challenge under the name Afishionado. Afishionado was a drafting game where each player drew two tiles from a bag, passed one to the player on their left, and finally chose one to draft to their aquarium. Each tile had a combination of two fish and one bottom dweller, all of which scored points in a unique way, and their placement & tank-mates in your aquarium would impact the number of points they scored. Tiles were placed in a specific ‘habitat’ of your aquarium, and fish would score end-game bonus points if placed in their preferred habitat. Your aquarium was made up of two different habitats, each with 3 ‘zones’ for tiles (for a total of 6 tiles), so players needed to weigh the scoring options of the end-game habitat bonuses vs. the scoring effects of the fish & bottom dwellers on their tiles.

Afishionado used clear tiles for the contest, which were placed in a small component holder, to appear as though the fish were swimming in the habitat they were placed in. This created a really cool and fun effect for the game - but ultimately, wouldn’t be a long term solution. It was costly to make, the tiles scratched easily when drawn from the bag, and was a little fiddly overall. All that said, this was still one of my favorite designs because it was so fun to see your aquarium develop before your eyes.

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Afishionado transitioned into a card game, following the same gameplay formula: draw two cards, pass one to your neighbor, and draft one to your aquarium. Early iterations saw dozens and dozens of playtests, but consistently hit the same road block with feedback - the card passing component to the game just didn’t feel impactful. The typical card-passing loop worked like this:

• Draw 2 cards, choose the best of the two to keep in your hand, and pass the other one to an opponent

• Receive a card from your neighbor (which usually wouldn’t be better than the one you originally kept)

• Draft the original card you kept to your aquarium, unless your opponent passed you a better card

While it sometimes created interesting decisions (if you were passed a good card and you had to choose between two good ones), the mechanism didn’t usually facilitate this outcome. When players drew their opening hand of two cards, they would typically choose to keep the best card for their aquarium, without considering the benefits of the card they were passing to their opponent. Even if they had the option to “hate draft,” it was usually only beneficial to do if both cards were equally good for them, and one card was worse for the neighbor they were passing to. 

There needed to be more intentionality to drafting and a little more bite to card passing. While Afishionado was a cute & fun drafting game, it didn’t quite separate itself from other games doing the same thing.

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I began testing a different version which completely removed the habitat cards. In the previous version, cards could be placed in any available zone within the two habitats, but in this version, drafted cards could only be placed on one of the two ends of your aquarium - either the right or left side. The ‘habitats’ were moved to the background of each card, and players scored their end-game bonus points if they were able to place matching habitats next to each other. 

This was a fun little addition that cleaned up some of the components to the game and was met with good feedback. I experimented with some other new ideas, such as adding decorations to your aquarium and end-game goals, but things ended up turning into a huge mish-mosh of points and goals and didn’t quite facilitate the type of drafting that I had hoped. 

After taking some time away from Afishionado to work on other designs, I returned to it and had a bit of a ‘eureka’ moment when experimenting with a face-down, push-your-luck draft. In this version, I had players draw an opening hand of three cards (instead of two), draft one card to their aquarium, and pass the remaining two cards in their hand face-down to their neighbors - one card to the player on their left and one to the player on their right. This meant that all players ended up with two face-down cards (one from each neighbor), and had to flip one card at a time, deciding if they wanted to draft it. If they flipped the first card and didn’t like what they saw, they could discard it and push their luck with the second one - accepting the risk that they had to keep whatever the second card was. It turned into a fun game of “do you pick the devil you know or the devil you don’t” and opened up some really fun drafting decisions. 

This was a really great development and I began playing around with themes - moving from aquarium building, to a medieval castle building theme, and eventually settling on Azure. I adjusted point values to be a little ‘meaner,’ creating some really interesting draft & pass decisions - and things took off from there! 

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Azure is now officially signed with Moon Saga Workshop - more information to follow soon!