About Azul Tiles

The Project

Azul Tiles is a free browser-based implementation of the Azul tile-placement board game. You can play against friends in real time, challenge AI bots, climb the global ELO leaderboard, or just learn the rules against a beginner bot, all without downloading anything or creating an account.

The game launched in February 2023 and has been actively developed ever since, growing from a simple proof-of-concept into a fully-featured multiplayer game with six major version releases. Thousands of games have been played on the platform, and the community continues to grow through our Discord server.

Azul Tiles is built and operated by Fantasma Dev LLC, a small software company based in Erie, Pennsylvania. It is an independent project, not affiliated with Plan B Games, the publisher of the physical Azul board game.

About the Developer

I'm Justin, a software developer and the sole engineer behind Azul Tiles. I discovered the physical Azul board game a few years back and immediately loved its elegant simplicity: easy to learn, genuinely deep to master. The problem was that playing it online required either buying a paid app or gathering people for a video call. I wanted something you could just send a link to a friend and start playing in seconds.

So I built it.

What started as a weekend side project turned into a serious engineering effort. Azul Tiles runs on a real-time WebSocket server so that tile selections, placements, and scoring all happen live between players with no noticeable lag. The scoring engine implements the full Azul rule set, including all adjacency bonuses, floor line penalties, and the end-game row, column, and color completion bonuses. The bot AI uses a weighted scoring heuristic to play sensibly at multiple difficulty levels, giving new players a decent challenge to practice against.

Building this has deepened my understanding of the game itself. When you implement every edge case in code, you develop an intuition for the game that is hard to get any other way. That is part of why I write strategy guides on this site: I genuinely know this game from the inside out.

You can see more of my work at fantasma.dev.

The Physical Azul Board Game

The original Azul is a board game designed by Michael Riesling and published by Plan B Games. It was released in 2017 and quickly became one of the most celebrated modern board games, winning the prestigious Spiel des Jahres award in 2018 (Germany's highest honor for board games).

The game takes inspiration from the azulejo tiles that Portuguese king Manuel I brought back from the Alhambra palace in Granada. Players compete to collect and arrange these tiles on a decorative wall, scoring points based on how well they organize them. The tension between taking the tiles you want and not giving your opponent what they need is what makes Azul so compelling.

If you enjoy Azul Tiles, I strongly encourage picking up the physical game. It is a fantastic experience to play in person and makes for a wonderful gift. You can find it on Amazon and at most game shops.

Version History

Azul Tiles has been continuously improved since launch. Here is a look at what each major version introduced:

Community

Azul Tiles has a growing community of players who discuss strategy, report bugs, and suggest features on our Discord server. Community feedback has directly shaped improvements in every version, from the bot opponent mode to the current leaderboard design.

The ELO rating system creates friendly competition among regular players. Whether you are new to Azul or a seasoned player, check out our strategy guides written from the perspective of someone who built and plays this game every day.