Splendor

We ran two rounds of Splendor this weekend.  I had watched a gameplay video the night before, so I had a good idea of how it would play out.

But when we finally set it up and started playing, we found that the available choices were a lot trickier than I thought they would be.

The setup is as shown here ... it's a 5x4 grid with five patron tiles at the top, then there are blue, yellow, and green decks where you place the deck face down on the left and turn four cards face up next to that.  There are the five types of heavy gem chips and a stack of gold chips ... these all feel like the heaviest poker chips we have ever tried to pick up.  Nice solid pieces and colorful artwork

Game play sounds simple.  There are only a few options:
- take one each of three different gems
- take two of one color gem if there are at least four gems left in that pile
- buy a card for the gem cost shown
- stash a card in your hand by taking a card and a gold token

That last option felt really odd.  You can stash up to three cards in your hand and buy one of those as your play on some future move.  The gold chip was the odd part.  They act as a wild card when it comes to purchasing a card.  After trying it a few times, I suppose the free gold chip was compensation for losing a turn.  I don't know.  It felt like a cheat move that you get rewarded for.

Those colored decks represent different tiers of cards: green cards have one dot and felt like common loot, yellow cards had two dots and higher prices (uncommon), and the blue cards showing three dots were the most expensive (rare).  Most of the cards had a number showing, this is their prestige point value.  Many of the common green cards had no point value, but every card had a gem showing at top left.  Once you buy the card and have them in front of you, those acted like free gems, so if you need three green gems to buy a card, and you already have a card with a green gem showing, then you only need to put back two green gem chips to buy the card.

Neither of us knew what we were doing at first, but it was simple enough (on the surface) that we didn't have to look up any rules.  The choices of cards and gems were not easy.  The round ends when someone reaches 15 prestige points (then the other players take their turns).  So the points do start slow and then build quickly.  

After buying cards, the final tier of the game is getting those patron tiles.  Each tile has a cost in cards.  Not gems this time, but little rectangular colored card icons.  One patron might need 3 blue cards, 3 red and 3 white, where another might take 4 blue and 4 red.  Those were all worth 3 prestige points, so you end up building specific sets of cards.  Anne stole the 3/3/3 patron I had been building up to (when I was just one card away), which left me only two more turns to switch to the 4/4 patron, and time ran out before I could get that far.

Afterward, we tried to figure out why it was so difficult to pick the right moves.  Probably because there were so many choices.  There are two parallel decision trees going on: getting the gems needed for the pieces you want, then building the right sets of cards to get the patrons for those extra points.

This was another keeper.  It was our kind of game: a small set of rules that becomes interesting right away, and the feeling that there's a lot more to figure out in future matches.