When reading the instructions of the game, I was highly confused. Once we began to play the game I was moderately confused. Towards the end of the game I was less confused. Yet the second time we played the game I felt like I actually knew what was going on. I still lost – hard, but I knew why I lost hard, which is what really matters, right?

In my understanding, Splendor is a renaissance themed board/card game where the players act as gem merchants, collecting and trading gems tokens in exchange for development cards (I call them gem cards). The development (gem) cards have gems them, and some of them also have numbers, that number is known at prestige. There is a row of seperate cards along the top of the board, these are noble cards, they also have prestige points. If you obtain enough gems (including tokens and…