This is Day 19 of my Game-and-Blog-Every-Day-in-November Challenge. Search my blog for “Daily Game Challenge” for previous entries.

Splendor

It’d been a while since my wife and I played Splendor, one of my favorite gateway games. We love the poker-style chips used for gems; they’re heavy and chunky and they make trading with the bank easy and fun.

I love how Splendor teaches new players the basics of engine building. As players trade in their gems for the cards, they start to figure out that they can use those cards to buy other cards (some with victory points on them). Once they start putting together the gems to get those cards, it’s a fun race to 15 points.

The expansion, Cities of Splendor, is a fine addition to the base game, but not necessary unless you’ve played Splendor numerous times and want to freshen the game. We played the expansion earlier this year, yet I haven’t felt the need to add it to our games library. Until then, the base game is a fine two-player game; one that we get through in about 15 minutes.