Splendor, a classic board game that we still recommend

What is the board game? Splendor ?

In Splendoryou play as a merchant guild and collect resources, to buy goods, which themselves bring resources, to acquire even more expensive goods. Who will be the most effective in attracting patrons?

Accessible from 10, for 2 to 4 players and games of around thirty minutes, the theme is not the strong point of the game, which rather shines through its mechanics, as simple as they are effective.

Edited by Space Cowboys, Spendor is a game by Marc André, illustrated by Paul Vérité, and sold at the price of €31.50 at Philibert.

How do you play it?

The setup is very quick: you simply place the different resource tokens by color (diamonds, rubies, emeralds, etc.), and form three lines with the goods cards, according to their cost. In each line, turn over the first 4 cards.

In turn, we basically have a choice between two main actions.

The first, the most common at the beginning of the game, consists of taking resources: either three tokens of different colors, or two identical tokens. But be careful, you are limited to 10 resources in total. Any excess is lost.

The second is to spend these resources to buy cards. Each of them requires a specific combination of tokens (for example two diamonds and two emeralds). This card is then placed in front of us.

In its upper right corner is a resource: for the rest of the game, it offers a virtual resource of the type indicated for our future purchases. It thus becomes increasingly simple to buy increasingly expensive cards, needing fewer tokens.

The cards in the first group are quite accessible, but bring almost no victory points, if any. Those in the second require a little more resources, but bring some points. The third and last group offers very lucrative cards, but also very expensive. So much so that it is impossible to buy them only with our stock of tokens, we must use the resources provided by our previously acquired cards.

Note that in turn you can also choose to reserve a card. You put it aside, you can buy it later in the game, or not, but above all as a gift you receive a gold token, acting as a wild card for any resource.

Finally, patrons are randomly drawn at the start of the game, offering different prerequisites in terms of number and type of cards. The first player to fulfill them receives the patron… and the points that go with it.

Players play this way round after round, until one of them reaches 15 victory points, which ends the game.

Why play Splendor ?

So yes, Splendor is not brand new. The publisher took advantage of its tenth anniversary to bring it up to date and review all of its illustrations.

But then, 10 years later, is it still worth it? And if I already have the old version, should I buy the new one?

Let’s quickly get this second question out of the way: unless you’re a huge fan of the new illustrations, or you’ve played your current copy so much that it’s all dirty, no, there’s no point in buying the new version of the game. And for good reason, the rules are strictly the same, nothing has changed. And after 5 minutes of play, we hardly pay any more attention to the illustrations of the cards, new or old, we focus only on the values ​​on them.

We even regret that the publisher did not take advantage of this to reduce the size of the box (which still contains quite a bit of empty space), and to replace the poker chips, which are certainly pleasant to handle but made of plastic, with wooden chips.

But the game itself, its gameplaywhat about 10 years later? Time has no hold on it, it is still as satisfying, still as enjoyable, still as gripping. Whether it is with 2, 3 or 4 players, whatever the configuration, the games are tense, disputed. Note however that if you plan to play it exclusively with two players, we recommend the dedicated version, Splendor Duel.

For further

And even if the rules are simple, and the material is limited to a few tokens and a few cards, you really get caught up in the game. What a pleasure to gradually build your “engine”, struggling at the beginning to buy the smallest card, to finally finish the game with almost no tokens left to spend to acquire the most expensive and most interesting cards!

But it is also and above all a game of anticipation, where you have to plan several turns in advance, while remaining opportunistic to react to what your opponents are doing. The difference between a player who knows where he is going and what he is looking for, and another who plays haphazardly, is strongly felt in the final score.

Splendor Did it need a graphical overhaul? No, not particularly. Splendor Does it deserve to be on store shelves 10 years after its release? Certainly yes, as the game has managed to establish itself over time, to finally rise to the rank of the essential classics of modern games.

In short

We liked

• Simple rules…
• …but a deep game
• Tense and stakeholder parties
• What a pleasure to set up a game “engine”

We liked less

• We would have liked a more compact box
• Lack of interactions (except to steal a card coveted by an opponent)
• A theme? Where?