Águeda: City of Umbrellas is a great-looking game with high-quality components. I just wish there was more game in here.
Águeda is a town in Portugal that hosts the Umbrella Sky Project, a permanent art installation that began as a temporary one in 2012 but that has expanded and become a major attraction for the city. Several pedestrian streets in Águeda have umbrellas of many colors sitting above them, forming artificial canopies that produce different visual effects depending on the time of day and the weather conditions.
The game Águeda has players collect umbrella tokens from the market and place them in three rows along their personal board, which represents one street. You also have a mural with six tiles on it, all of which begin the game face down; each tile has a different umbrella color on its back. And you have six tourist meeples, three of which are available to you at the start and three of which you can unlock by flipping the two mural tiles in their row.
On your turn, you take a complete row of umbrellas from the market, comprising one to three tokens. If you take a row of three tokens, you must pay one coin to the bank; if you take a row of just a single token, you receive one coin. (I’ll leave it to you to figure out what happens if you take a row of two tokens.) You then put all umbrellas into a single row on your street, in any order you like. Each row has two spaces marked with paintbrushes, and if you place an umbrella on one, you then flip the mural tile with that color of umbrella on its back.
You then may place one or two available tourist meeples on the tourist space next to any row on your board as long as it does not already have any meeples on it. Each of these spaces has two colors on it. If you place two meeples, you get one point per umbrella of either color in that row. If you place one meeple, you must choose one color to score. If you can’t place a meeple, or simply wish to get your meeples back, you may rest instead, returning all placed meeples to their spaces on the top of your board, marked with little suitcases.
Play continues until one player fills all 21 umbrella spaces on their board, after which they get the bicycle token, which has no function other than to mark that someone finished the game, and all other players get one last turn. You then score for your mural, getting 2/4/6 points for flipping 4/5/6 tiles; and you score for the three shops, two of which vary in every game, while the third ostensibly is permanent since it’s printed on the board, although you could just choose a third shop from the deck to cover it. The permanent shop gives you ½ point for each umbrella on your street that matches any of the special wooden umbrella tokens randomly placed on the shop at the start of the game. In the beginner setup, you use two other specific shops, one of which gets two random wooden umbrellas and gives you a point for every column on your street with at least one of those colors, while the other gets one color and gives you 1 point for each umbrella of that color but only if you have an even number of them on your street.
I’m not the first person to compare this game to Azul, but I find it unavoidable, and it is not to Águeda’s benefit. Azul is tighter and has a high degree of player interaction, to the point of spitefulness if you choose to play it that way (I think that strategy has diminishing returns – a little spite goes a long way). You also have a lot to think about on almost every turn. My 7-year-old stepdaughter said the morning after we played Águeda that she thought “the turns got a little boring because you’re just doing the same thing over and over,” and she’s right. You don’t have that many choices, so your decisions on any one turn are limited, and there’s zero player interaction to spice things up.
The game does look amazing, and we all agreed (including my older stepdaughter as well) that the murals are the best part of the game – there are five unique ones and they’re all fun to reveal. It pops on the table, with solid plastic umbrella pieces that feel very sturdy and bright colors all over the place. It’s a pretty heavy box for a light game, with a promised play time of 20-40 minutes that I think leans closer to to 40. There just isn’t enough substance here; it feels like a game that could have been an hour in length with more spaces to fill and a better selection mechanic, maybe even some kind of drafting, or just a different format to the market. I just don’t see any way I’d pick this over the basic Azul game now that everyone in the house is old enough to handle it.