Splendor is a multiplayer card-basedboard game, designed by Marc André and illustrated by Pascal Quidault, first published in 2014 by Space Cowboys, Asmodee. The board consists of cards laid out in a grid. Players are gem merchants of the Renaissance buying gem mines, transportation, and shops. The game was nominated for the 2014 Spiel des Jahres. An expansion, Cities of Splendor, was released in 2017 with four included modules.
Gameplay
Splendor is an engine-building and resource management game in which two to four players compete to collect the most prestige points. The game uses the following:
40 gem tokens - seven each of emerald, sapphire, ruby, diamond, onyx, and five gold. These are represented by poker-style chips.
90 development cards
10 Noble tiles
Each development card falls into one of three levels indicating the difficulty of obtaining the gems required to purchase that card. Every development card also is worth a particular gem, which may be used for future development card purchases. Before the game begins, n+1 Noble tiles are dealt in the center, visible to the players, where n is the number of players. Four cards from each level are dealt face up visible to the players, and the rest are kept in separate decks of their corresponding difficulty levels.
Turns
A player's turn consists of a single action, which must be one of the following:
Take up to three gem tokens of different colors from the pool.
Take one gold gem token and reserve one development card.
Purchase a development card by spending the required gem tokens or/and using the value of the cards in your field of play.
After this action:
If the player has earned enough development card gems to trigger a Noble points bonus, that player is "visited" by the Noble, and takes that Noble tile.
* If player is eligible for visit by more than one Noble, player can choose the Noble.
* Noble tile is not replaced by a new one.
* Player gets to keep the Noble until the end of the game.
If player has more than 10 gems in possession, return few gems to limit total count of gems in your possession to 10 or lesser.
If a development card is purchased, it is replaced from the top card on the respective deck. When the deck runs out, there are no more cards of that rank available.
End of game
When one player reaches 15 prestige points, the players continue playing the current round until each player has taken the same number of turns. Once this occurs, the game ends.
Scoring
Once the game ends, whoever has the most prestige points wins; in case of a tie, whoever purchased the fewest development cards wins. If this fails to break the tie, the players will then share the victory.
