Splendor ( Space Cowboys)

Splendor is a multiplayer card-based board game, designed by Marc André and illustrated by Pascal Quidault. It was published in 2014 by Space Cowboys (Asmodee). Players are gem merchants of the Renaissance, developing gem mines, transportation, and shops to accumulate prestige points. Splendor received positive reviews and received numerous awards, including winner of Golden Geek Best Family Board game.

30 mins

2 - 4 Players

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 has the following components:

• 40 gem tokens - seven each of emerald, sapphire, ruby, diamond, onyx, and five gold (wild). These are represented by poker-style chips.^[3]
• 90 development cards
• 10 noble tiles

Each development card falls into one of three levels (•, ••, •••) indicating the difficulty to purchase that card.

Every development card also contains a gem bonus (emerald, sapphire, ruby, diamond, or onyx), which may be used for future development card purchases.

Before the game begins, n+1 Noble tiles are dealt face up in the center, 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:^[4]

• Take up to three gem tokens of different colors from the pool.
• Take two gem tokens of the same color from the pool (provided, before the turn, there are at least four tokens left of that color).
• Take one gold gem token and reserve one development card (if, before the turn, number of reserved cards held by that player is less than three)
• Purchase a development card (from the table or the player's reserved cards) by spending the required gem tokens and/or using the gem bonus of the cards purchased previously by the player. Spent gems return to the pool.

After this action:

• If the player has earned enough development card gem bonuses to obtain Noble prestige points, that player is "visited" by the Noble, and takes that Noble tile.
  • A player can only be visited by one noble in each turn; the player chooses between the eligible nobles.
  • Player keeps the Noble until the end of the game.
  • Noble tiles are not replenished.
• If player possesses more than 10 gems, player returns enough gems to limit total count of gems in player's possession to 10 or fewer.
• If a development card is purchased, the empty slot is replenished from the respective deck. If the deck of that rank has run out, the slot stays empty.

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 player with fewest reserved cards wins. If all else fails, the players will then share the victory.^[5]