Build momentum through asset acquisition. It sounds simple enough and Splendor does a great job in making it easy, but being efficent at it is an art form. This is one of those games that possesses the dichotomy of those brilliantly designed: the rules are simple and the layout is minimalist, but developing a winning strategy is far from easy. It’s a 30 minute, 2-4 player game easy to grasp by new players, but the complexity hidden behind the simple mechanics makes it interesting, challenging and will leave you wanting to play it again.
Before I explain how the game mechanics follow the same principles as networking, let’s have a look at these first:
- There are cards (assets), poker chips (gems), and noble tokens (victory points).
- During a player’s turn, he may take up to 3 chips or buy cards (paying their cost in chips). The chips and card prices are of different colors, and so to buy a particular card you must pay the correct combination of colored chips.
- Each card you buy represents one permanent gem of a certain type, making further card purchases 1 gem cheaper of that type for you (if you have two cards of that type, it would be 2 gems cheaper, and so on). There is a row of cheap cards, another of medium priced cards and then the expensive one’s. The latter also award victory points.
- Lastly, if you possess a right combination of gems indicated in a noble token, he will be attracted to you (you will receive the noble token for free) and you will gain additional victory points.
These are the reasons why this is a “make me better” game:
- My gain vs your loss: the only interaction between the players strategies resides in the fact that they play with the same pool of cards (assets) and chips (gems), and therefore taking the last gems of a certain type or taking a card that you foresee another player is aiming for is a resource you would be wise to make good use of.
- Networking: not in the sense of attending events to give out business cards, but in the sense of cleverly building your network (of assets in this case), or “connecting”, to achieve your goal efficiently. You will have to ponder which asset will take one you step closer to your goal in the ladder that is your strategy. This may seem simple, but you’ll probably realize you could use a bit of practice; specially when another player steals the card you were saving gems for and have to rethink your plan.
- Short, medium and long term planning: successful players will have to think out the steps they will take to build their “network” of assets, starting by knowing which cheap cards they’ll buy first so that they can acquire the more expensive one’s with the minimum cost and as quickly as possible. Not planning well can lead to either the bamboo or privet metaphor: bamboo can grow up to 1 meter a day but takes years for it to grow it’s required rooting and surface, on the other hand, privet lacks its rooting, starts growing very quickly but won’t grow as high.
On a side note, there are other characteristics of the game that make it all that much more interesting:
- It’s all about investing your chips (currency) in cards (assets), which in turn will make buying further cards easier. This is the same principle that Robert Kiyosaki encourages in his best-seller “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” as the means of escaping what he calls the rat race (the neverending path of working to live, where the more you earn the more you spend and the more your have to work…). Escaping the rat race requires developing the ability and discipline to invest in assets (which in turn become new additional revenues) and doing this is for us, states enterpreneur Eben Pagan, “counter-intuitive”.
- Networking is like opening doors, and opening the right doors leads to success. In line with what Shane Snow explains in “Smartcuts” and Micheal Ellsberg in “The Education of Millionaires“, the path to success (whatever success means to you) will require networking; the better you understand it and the better you’re at it, the sooner you’ll achieve it.
Well, playing Splendor seems like a fun way to reeducate ourselves and improve in these respects.
The only con I see is that it’s not very social, there is little interaction between the players (if at all); but hey, that way you can concentrate more on your game :).
And to close the post, here’s a video of a full game played by the boardgamegeektv crew.