Alhambra is a mixture of auction game and tile laying game, not to be confused with Gardens of the Alhambra, although the publisher and game designer are the same. Your objective is to buy tiles that represent buildings like Towers, Pavilions and Chambers, and place them into your Alhambra, which starts out as a humble fountain. The tiles are all excellent quality thick cardstock, there is a scoring track and each player has a board where they can place tiles in reserve. The artwork is bright and colourful, and the tiles are clearly named and numbered.

You start with a hand of money cards that are colour coded to orange, green, blue and yellow, numbered from 1 to 9, and four money cards are laid out face up. Four tiles are laid out on the auction board, one matched to each of four colours, orange, green, blue and yellow. The tiles have values from 4 to 13, so if a tile worth 10 is matched to yellow, you can spend yellow money cards equal to 10 or more to buy that tile and place it in your Alhambra or into your reserve if it doesn’t quite fit.

If you pay exactly the right amount you can have another turn, which is important as your options in each turn are to buy a tile and place it, take a money card, or redesign your Alhambra by adding or swapping a tile from the reserve, or removing a tile to the reserve. If you have exactly the right money you could feasibly buy four tiles and then have another action, so it is a viable strategy to just pick up money cards for several turns.

Scoring is based on three phases, the first two phases end when a scoring card is drawn from the money deck, and these are shuffled into the deck at roughly even intervals of cards. The last phase is scored when the bag of tiles is empty, though you get an opportunity to buy the last tiles left on the auction board, depending on who has the most money in each colour.

Scoring is based on who has the most tiles of each given building type, which are colour coded so that Gardens are green and Arcades are brown. In the second phase players with the next most also score, while in the third phase players with the second and third most also score. Points are split evenly and rounded down in the event of ties.

Most of the tiles also have a wall on one to three sides of the tile, and this determines how difficult it is to place a tile, because you can only place walls next to other walls, and you must be able to reach a newly laid tile from an existing tile without crossing a wall. You really have to take about not just what type of tiles you buy to score points, but how they will fit into your Alhambra, and whether other players are competing for the same type of tile.

So you have several layers of game play with Alhambra. Firstly in the auction you can just buy what is available, or save up money for the future, or buy mostly two or three colours of tile, or spread your purchases across four or five. Quite often second place is as good as first. Secondly you have tile placement and whether you buy expensive tiles with less walls or buy cheaper tiles with more walls and just be choosy about which ones you buy.

You get bonus points for having long external walls linked across several tiles, which can make the difference between scoring one position higher, but you take the risk of closing off your Alhambra if you concentrate too much on walls. As the player count increases you have less options, because often other players will get the tiles that you might have been collecting money for, and in that regard there is an additional tactic in paying attention to what your opponents draw and what they have spent in recent turns.