Diggy Diggy Hole (Splendor)

You turn the jewels in your hand, checking the quality carefully.  True, you may be some minor noble who doesn't know a Princess cut from a Radiant, but that's beside the point.  These look good, and you have always been able to find contacts to make them seem better.  Your job isn't to make, it's to sell the splendor of these jewels, and sell you shall...



BACKGROUND:  Splendor is a tile collection game for 2 to 4 players, and created by Marc André with art by Pascal Quidault, and published by Space Cowboys.  Each player attempts to collect gems to gather more ways to collect gems and gather Nobles to your side

GAMEPLAY:  3 rows of 4 development cards are laid face-up.  Each turn, players may either gather 2 gem tokens of 1 kind, 3 gem tokens of all different kinds, 1 "wild" gold token and reserve a card in their hand so only they may play it, or spend their gems back to the center in order to buy a development card, according to its cost on the bottom left.  Players may only have 10 tokens at any time, returning any excess back to the center.



DEVELOPMENT:  Development cards count as 1 free gem in their top right each turn, and unlike the tokens, players are not limited to how many they can hold.  Development cards are also the only way to collect Nobles.  Nobles can only be collected at the end of a turn, when a player has the number of developments indicated on the Nobles card.

WINNING:  Nobles and various Development cards have Prestige Points in the top left.  The first player to reach 15 Prestige wins.

CONCLUSION:  Splendor is, should I say it?  Splendid.  There's a lot to like about this game.  It's easy enough that I can realistically teach all but the youngest of players how to play, but a depth most simpler games fail to reach.  The complaints I have are minor at best, laughably silly at worst.  First, games tend to be way too short.  It feels like you've just bought your first 2nd level Development, and the game is over.  The other is the amount of players.  Obviously, re-balancing this game would be hard for more than 4 players, but I would really like to make it so that might whole game night group of 5-8 players can play this together.  With the release of the Cities of Splendor expansion, that may end up becoming more of a reality sometime down the line.  Until then, as I said, this game is a Splendor to behold.