Meanwhile there are many masters that make these tiles today - I know one personally! - and they all struggle to find clients.

I just googled it and apparently these are often chipped of historical buildings and sold as tourist souvenirs. Thanks for informing us

I'll take advantage of your domain knowledge :) Where's the best place to find local artists that produce them?

2 player can lead to fist fights.

I love it, still my favorite game after all those years, there is so much depth with such a simple mechanic.

Whenever I want to play with a game engine I reimplement a version of it

It really gets complex in a 4 player version and if also if you play thr version where the colors of the tiles are not set on the board. Fun game!!

Portuguese here - many Portuguese words have origin from Arabic as Portugal has been conquered and occupied by "the Moors" in 8th~13th century. That's a long time! Alentejo, Aljezur, Algarve, and many of the cities in the Southern part of the country have have Arabic origins.

The arabic word for "azul" is أزرق (azraq) so they all look pretty adjacent.

interestingly, apparently "azul" also comes from the arabic "lāzuward"

This wikipedia article, the wiktionary entry for Portuguese, and the Spanish wiktionary entry all have different etymologies lmao.

As a Spanish speaker it seems really hard to believe it's not azul + -ejo. They're literally blue.

This is one of those words that can sound exotic, but for the locals would be so plain and uneventful to hear. Kinda like all the Japanese words being used for software project names on Github.

As in many countries, it is staple but not an art. They're just tilings.

What the Spanish, Moroccan and Portuguese do with azulejos / zellij is miles ahead. It is intricate, complex and beautiful.

Those countries just take the think into crazy high levels of beauty. It is not in the same league.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=zellij+morocco&sxsrf=APpeQns...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=azulejo+sevillano&udm=2&sxsr...

I've read somewhere Forgejo comes from esperanto.

Nope, not at all, very different etymologies

I also wanted to see more about the temperature control aspect and was scanning the article for it. Some quick additional searching elsewhere turned up possible effects such as reflective surfaces, thermal mass, and moisture buffering.