How to play Splendor

Splendor is a gem-trading engine-builder by Marc André in which you play a Renaissance merchant acquiring mines, trade routes, and artisans across three tiers of development cards. Each card you buy grants a permanent gem bonus — a standing discount that makes future purchases cheaper — plus any prestige points printed on the card.

The gameplay is deceptively simple but tactically sharp. You're constantly deciding whether to grab tokens now, lock in a key card with a reservation, or pivot your engine toward the noble tiles that reward focused bonus collections with free prestige. A well-built engine snowballs quickly, so reading the table matters as much as optimizing your own board.

Never played an engine builder? Splendor may be the purest one there is. The loop: take tokens this turn so you can buy a card the next; every card you buy is a permanent discount on everything that follows, so a purchase that once needed three turns of saving eventually costs nothing at all. If your first few turns feel slow, that's not you playing badly — that's the engine warming up.

What's in the box, and what each piece does at the table:

• 90 development cards (40 Level 1, 30 Level 2, 20 Level 3) — the mines, ships, and workshops you buy. Each card shows a gem cost in its corner and two payoffs on top: a permanent gem bonus that discounts every future purchase by one token of that color, and often prestige points. Level 1 cards are cheap engine fuel with little or no prestige; Level 3 cards cost a fortune but pay up to 5 points each.
• 40 gem tokens (7 each of emerald, sapphire, ruby, diamond, and onyx, plus 5 gold jokers) — chunky poker-style chips, the game's entire economy. The five gem colors are what you take and spend; gold is wild and stands in for any gem, but can only ever be gained by reserving a card — never taken as a normal token action. Token counts shrink at 2–3 players, and gold is always exactly 5.
• 10 noble tiles — Renaissance patrons worth 3 prestige each. Only players-plus-one are in play each game; a noble visits you automatically — and for free — at the end of a turn in which your card bonuses meet the tile's requirements. Nobles never cost an action, which is exactly why they win games.

On your turn, take exactly one of these four actions:

1. Take 3 gems of different colors — one token each from any three different gem piles (never gold).
2. Take 2 gems of the same color — only allowed if that pile holds at least 4 tokens before you take.
3. Reserve a card — take any face-up market card, or gamble on the unseen top card of any deck, into your hand, and take 1 gold if any remains. You may hold at most 3 reserved cards; they can never be discarded, only bought, and only by you. Reserving is the only way to get gold — and a clean way to deny a rival the card they need.
4. Buy a card — from the face-up market or from your own reserve. Pay its gem cost with tokens (gold is wild), reduced by your bonuses: every card you own permanently counts as one gem of its color, so you may eventually buy cards for free. Spent tokens return to their piles; display the bought card in front of you, sorted by color, with bonuses and points visible.

Whenever a face-up card is bought or reserved, immediately replace it from its deck — the market always shows 4 cards per level while the deck lasts.

Then two end-of-turn checks:

• Token limit — you may never end your turn holding more than 10 tokens (gold included); return any excess, including tokens you just drew.
• Noble visit — if your card bonuses now meet a noble tile's requirements, that noble visits you automatically: take the tile and its 3 prestige. It costs no action and cannot be refused; if you qualify for more than one, choose — only one noble per turn.

A few turns in practice. Ana takes three different gems: a ruby, an emerald, an onyx. Beto takes 2 sapphires — legal, because the sapphire pile still holds 4. Carla reserves the 4-point Level 3 card Ana was obviously saving toward, pocketing a gold with it. Diego buys a Level 1 card costing 2 diamonds and 1 sapphire; since a card he already owns gives a diamond bonus, he pays just 1 diamond token and 1 sapphire — and the new card's emerald bonus makes his next purchase cheaper still. Turns later, that engine finishes a set of 3 emerald, 3 sapphire, and 3 ruby bonuses, and the noble requiring exactly that visits him at the end of his turn: 3 prestige, no action spent.

The game end triggers the moment a player reaches 15 prestige points — cards and nobles combined — during their turn. Complete the current round so every player has taken the same number of turns, then the player with the most prestige wins (don't forget to count your nobles). Ties are broken in favor of the player who bought fewer development cards — the more efficient engine takes it.

The surest path to victory is building an engine early — cards that grant bonuses in the colors you need most let you buy higher-tier cards almost for free. Pick a noble target early and angle your bonuses toward its requirements; nobles never cost an action and can be the margin between a win and a loss.