


The best opportunity for this is with the card-reservation mechanism, where you can take a card into your hand in order to block an opponent’s strategy. Unfortunately I do not see a lot of that with Splendor. Many excellent games rely on fantastic tactical-level decisions, where you must constantly read the state of the games and your opponents, and react and respond to both in order to gain an upper hand. I do not find this particularly compelling.īut wait! Games do not need to have a robust level of strategic decision making in order to be good. Obviously you can work in between those two extremes, but those are generally the two routes available to you.
ITS TACTICAL POKER CHIP FOR FREE
The most obvious strategy is to build a robust tableau in order to grab more expensive, point-granting cards for free or nearly for free in the late game, or you can collect gem chips almost exclusively in order to limit the number of available gems for other players, and to purchase point-granting cards before the tableau building people can gain momentum. Oh Snapġ: There are only a couple of primary strategies.Ģ: Most of your turns will be uninteresting.ģ: The game does not create very much tension.*įirst, the strategies in the game seem very limited. The problem is that by stripping the tableau building concept down, the designer has also stripped away a lot of…fun. Splendor is extremely easy to learn and elegantly designed. Even though I am hopelessly lost when playing Go, I can see that it is a masterful feat of design. Also, elegance as a design concept can produce beautiful results. I love Lost Cities, Ticket to Ride, and Sushi Go!. Simple, easy to learn games can be fantastic. This is just about the most simplified version of the classic eurogame engine-building concept possible. In other words, if you purchase an emerald card you will always have one emerald available to spend on your turn. The cards act like permanent gem resources. On your turn you may collect resources (in the form of delightfully heavy poker chips with images of gems on them), purchase a card using these gems, or take a “wild” gem poker chip and reserve one of the cards to your hand. A display of 12 cards are laid face up in the middle of the table. I’ll ignore all of that, much like you will about 10 seconds into the game.

If you get the right combination of dig sites, a noble might visit you to give you points. Ostensibly the theme is about gaining rare gems, which allow you to buy gem-creating resources (dig sites, I suppose?), which then let you buy better, point scoring dig sites. In essence it’s an extremely abstracted and distilled example of the tableau-building genre of games. Splendor is not a bad game by any means, but I do not understand why it gained such immense acclaim. Honestly, I don’t see what the fuss is about. It was nominated for the industry’s most prestigious award, the Spiel des Jahres, and is inevitably mentioned among the best “gateway” or “light” games available. No game since Splendor came out in 2014 has more ratings. For comparison, Catan has a bit over 200,000 plays logged. To wit: right now it’s one of the 25 most rated games on and has over 150,000 plays logged on the site.

Splendor burst into the boardgaming scene a couple of years ago, becoming one of the most popular board game titles ever.
