Rules Question: Partially fill a row?

[FunBoardPlayer]

Hello all,

Does anyone know if you can deliberately partially fill a row with tiles, letting one or more fall to the floor line?

Off BGA when I play with friends, the issue has come up a few times (albeit rarely, and only for endgame defensive purposes), and since we cannot find anything in the rules that seems to explicitly prohibit this, we consider the rules to be vague at best, and have decided to allow it. (Of course, if it's always a completely idiotic move to even consider playing regardless, that's a whole other issue we are open to learning about as well. )

"Any tiles you have picked that you cannot or do not want to place
according to the rules, you must place in your floor line..." -- Azul rules, p. 4

I know BGA did not implement this option into gameplay, but I was wondering if any other Azul players have ever had thoughts on this?

Thanks...

[thoun]

The rules says :

"Then, add the tiles you picked to one of the 5 pattern lines on
your player board (the first line has 1 space to hold 1 tile, the fifth
line has 5).
[...]
• Once all spaces of a pattern line are
filled, that line is considered complete. If you have picked up
more tiles than you can place in your chosen pattern line, you
must place the excess tiles in the floor line (see Floor line)."

For me it's the whole set of tiles you selected that you can put in one line, or put all on the floor line. You can't split the tiles you took between 2 lines, so I don't see why you could split them between a line and the floor line.

[SquashEngineer]

"All or none, on any given line." is how we are playing. We have never interpreted a scenario where a group of tiles could be split between a line and the floor.

[DrRockenheimer]

I think the English rules are pretty open-ended about allowing such a move, essentially saying that you can break the usual placement rules for any of the tiles you picked up and put them on the floor line instead. That could be the optimal move to avoid the end of game, or maybe in some obscure situation involving a bag refill. And of course, for my favorite catch-all situation, as part of an agreement in a 3+ player game when the group really enjoys injecting negotiation into a game not really designed for such.

That said, I don't know if this was the design intent, and entirely understandable not to implement that option on BGA in any case.