Azul is one of our favorite games (by proof of it being our most played game of 2018) but it’s incredibly frustrating that the game has you placing discarded tiles back in the box lid until they’re needed to replenish the bag. This is dumb and stupid and a blight on an otherwise amazing game.
But I have a solution, and it’s absolutely wonderful.
Enter the Collapsible Painting Water Cup. We paint a lot of miniatures and canvases in our household so there’s one of these scattered about every room almost. For painting, they’re amazing. They’re small, rigid, secure, and have paint brush holders on the top to hold your brush as you do anything else. They’re easy to clean and a godsend for people like me who don’t have a permanent paint station.
I’m not here to talk about their benefit for painting though. I’m talking about them as a component cup for Azul. Once a round is complete, players can chuck their tiles in the cup and when the bag needs to be refilled, the bag fits neatly around the cup for an easy transfer. When the game is done, the cup can be made compact and fits right in the Azul box, ready for the next play.
“Won’t using the cup cause the tiles to hit against one another more often and increase the probability of chipping or damaging?”
These aren’t Terraforming Mars components. After over 113 plays (didn’t always record every single one), the tiles look as new as they did coming out of the box for our first play.
This cup isn’t a necessity; dumping the tiles in the box top work okay but as a quality of life improvement (which lets face it, most board game accessories are), this has made the game so much quicker and enjoyable to clean up and tear down. All tiles will fit in the cup, which can then be dumped in the bag for storage. I will never play Azul without my collapsible cup.
Two off the Top 