Splendor
by Aethyna
Jul 20, 2018 |
1
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1
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10
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Genres:
Board , CardGraphics:
2DLabels:
Business/ EconomyPlatforms:
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Asmodee Digital Increase your prestige by trading gems to develop your town and attract the attention of powerful nobles in this digital adaptation of a much-beloved cards-and-chips game, Splendor! Enjoy the game’s many intriguing challenges; play with your friends via multiplayer mode; or ramp up the difficulty by playing the expansions of the classic. Play Now Similar Games Played
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Summary
Splendor by Asmodee Digital is a digital adaptation of the original, and much beloved, cards-and-chips game where you get to assume to role of a mayor of some sort. In this game, you’ll need to collect and trade gems in order to develop your town (by purchasing development cards) and attract the attention of powerful nobles.
Gameplay
For someone who has not played the game before, Splendor can be a tad bit difficult to get into. Thankfully, the game provides you with a nifty tutorial which details all the rules of the game. As the game is digital, it will prevent you from making any unallowed actions anyway, so you just need to know the few rules which you’ll need in order to devise your gameplay strategy.
Basically, Splendor is made up of 3 main aspects – development cards, gem and gold tokens and noble tiles. Let’s take a quick at them one by one!
Development cards come in 3 levels, and naturally, the higher-level cards are a lot rarer than lower-level cards. These cards will be drawn and place, face-up, on the playing area for any player to buy.
Each card has a price and a Bonus. Naturally, you’ll need to have the corresponding number of gem tokens required to buy a development card. The bonus, on the other hand, works a lot like a discount. So, if you have a development card that has a ruby bonus on it, this means that you get 1 ruby token off your subsequent card purchases.
Most cards – generally, level 2 and 3 cards – also grant you prestige points when the cards are purchased. These points are what you ultimately need to win the game. The player who has the most prestige points once any player manages to reach 15 prestige points will win the match.
For gem tokens, although they come in different types (5 in total), their value is pretty much the same. Players can collect up to 3 gem tokens of different types per turn, but if they want to collect gem tokens of the same type in a turn, they will only be able to collect 2. There’s catch though – if the total number of tokens is 4 or less, you won’t be able to take 2 gem tokens of the same type. You can’t hoard gem tokens either since each player can only have up to 10 tokens.
Like most cards-and-chips games, there’s also a “wild chip” here – the gold token – which functions a lot like the wild card in UNO and any other similar games. This means you can use the gold token in place of any other token when you’re making a card purchase.
Last but not least, the noble tiles, which are placed right next to the gem tokens, are quite similar to development cards in the sense that they have a “price” to “buy”. Basically, you need to have the corresponding number of Bonuses before you can attract a noble to your side, helping you to boost your prestige.
Note that you can attract more than one noble to your side as long as you manage to fulfill all of their requirements. Like the gem tokens, the number of noble cards you have in a game vary depending on the total number of players in the game.
So, how do you play this game? Well, the game is turn-based and in every turn, you can perform one of 4 actions – take 3 gem tokens of different types; take 2 gem tokens of the same type; reserve a development card, which will give you a free Gold token (up to 3 cards can be reserved per player); and purchase a card. That’s about it!
Splendor also provides you with a variety of game modes to enjoy, be it single player challenges, solo play or even multiplayer mode. If you are an advanced player, you can even grab some of the amazing expansions available which will add extra rules or gameplay elements to the game. There are 4 expansions at the moment.
Community
As Splendor is a Niche game, there isn’t a whole lot of players playing it. That being said, you should still be able to easily find a match if you’re not too picky about who you play the game with. You could also gift the game to your friends and get them to play with you!
Graphics/ Sound
The sound in this game is fantastic. It has a very nice, medieval-like tune that is mellow and soothing to listen to. The graphics, however, could use a bit of an improvement. I might be nitpicking here but I’ve noticed that the edges of cards, tokens and tiles are quite fuzzy. It’s not game-breaking though – it’s just a minor annoyance.
Conclusion
All in all, this digital version of Splendor does its original physical copy proud. The game followed the original gameplay down to a T and this can be a good thing, especially if you are simply looking for a digitized version of the game.
However, I personally think that the developers could make full use of the digital tools they have to improve on the game. For instance, they could replace the gem tokens with actual 3D gems. Wouldn’t that be a lot nicer-looking?
Splendor Blog
New Game Added: Splendor
by Aethyna
Jul 20, 2018
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