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.

On your turn, take exactly one of the following four actions:

• Take 3 different gems — take one token each from any three different non-gold colors.
• Take 2 of the same gem — take two tokens from one color pile; only allowed if that pile has at least 4 tokens.
• Reserve a card — take any face-up market card or the top card of a tier deck into your hand (you may hold up to 3 reserved cards), then take 1 gold token if any remain. Reserving is the only way to gain gold tokens — they cannot be taken as a regular gem action.
• Buy a card — pay its gem cost using tokens and/or the permanent bonuses on your owned cards; gold tokens are wild. Each development card you already own acts as one free, permanent token of its gem color — count those bonuses before deciding how many tokens to spend. Place the card in front of you and collect its bonus and prestige points.

At the end of your turn, discard tokens down to 10 if you are over. Then check whether any noble tile's bonus requirements are fully met by your owned cards (you need at least the shown bonuses of each color — more is fine) — if so, that noble visits you automatically and adds its prestige to your total (no action needed).

The game end triggers the moment a player reaches 15 prestige points 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. Ties are broken in favor of the player who bought fewer development cards.

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.