This is a series of posts where I play 100 boardgames.
Game: Splendor
Designer: Marc André
Year: 2014
Country: France
Publisher: Lautapelit.fi
For my money, the most difficult type of game to design must be streamlined, elegant games based on a single mechanism. Azul is a wonderful example of these, and Splendor is another. In the stark simplicity of the design, there’s nowhere to escape or hide if it doesn’t work optimally.
In Splendor, you have three rows of cards on the table, each with its own cost, gem type and point value. Your goal is to buy enough cards to get 15 victory points. The cost of a card could be three white gems and two green gems.
On your turn, you can either take gem tokens from the supply or buy cards from the table. The tokens are single use but if you have a white gem card, you can use it every time you buy cards from that point onwards. Thus, your goal is to accumulate different types of gem cards to make things cheaper and use the tokens as little as possible.
For example, you want to buy the card that costs three white and two green gems because it gives you three victory points. You have already accumulated one white gem card and two green gem cards. This means that you’d only need to pay two green gem tokens to have your way.
The mechanism of Splendor is simple but there’s a lot of depth to it. You can see what your opponents are doing and might even choose to sabotage them by buying the gems they need. Because everything is transparent, you can get a complete idea of what’s happening in the game at any given moment.
Perhaps because the gem tokens resemble poker chips, there’s an almost casino-like vibe to the game.