Christmas 2021 is coming to a close, and many families are just receiving their very first box of Splendor. The game is one of the most popular for the past couple of years, even being a bit hard to find at times. The goal is simple: reach fifteen points. But the way there can be a bit tricky until you master the rules of the game. Players can either draw three coins of different colors, draw two coins of the same color, draw a single gold coin (which act as a wild card coin), or buy a card. Cards have points, so getting them is the key to the game, and building a deck is likewise important. Along the way, the better players get, the more they can aim for picking up special noble cards or playing defense to block other players’ strategies.
Once you’ve mastered Splendor, there are some House Rules (also known as modifications) that I recommend based on our own experience of playing Splendor with friends and family for years now. With each change, I’ll explain why we made the decision, and then you can try it out. Again, I don’t recommend making these changes until you’re totally familiar with Splendor and the rules out of the box.
Change the Winning Point Value from Fifteen to Twenty-one
Splendor is a game that can be over rather quickly. That’s great for having multiple rounds in a single night. However, the defensive aspect of Splendor is harder to achieve when everyone is racing for a very fast finish. In our experience, playing to twenty-one instead of fifteen does not significantly increase the length of the game. You might only get two or three more turns out of the change because the end-game accumulates points quickly. However, those few extra chances mean all the world for having players be able to throw in some defensive strategies. It’s much more punishing to try to block another player if you’re going to fifteen than it is if you’re going to twenty-one. In our experience, that means going a few more turns will allow for more strategies that you might not see in a typical game of Splendor.
Stealing Reserves
One of the fun things in Splendor is the ability to pull a card off of the table and place it in your reserve. It means that you haven’t bought it yet, but nobody can buy it either. It’s like sticking a card in layaway. This is already a complicated thing for new players to figure out fully, because it can be used for a variety of purposes… still, there’s one extra layer of complexity we have found makes for very fun gameplay. We recommend playing where you can steal a reserve out of another player’s deck. To do so, you must spend a gold coin you already possess (i.e. you can’t pick up a gold coin and use it to steal a reserved card from someone else). You get to do nothing else during your turn.
What this does is it increases the number of players who want to hold gold coins, and thus makes them harder to get. It also means that players have a harder time reserving a fortuitous high tier card worth big points and waiting until they can grab the coins to pay for it. Now, reserving a card is something you do with a bit of risk; getting that card requires strategy and watching to see who has a gold coin that might try to steal your reserve from you.
Remove the Rule About Double Coin Pickup Limits
The one rule that we just recommend you drop is the official rule that you cannot pick up two coins of the same color on the same turn if the stack of coins in the bank has less than four available. That’s already convoluted, and it only affects a stack of coins with three or two available. In our experience, being able to pick up two coins of the same color regardless of how many the bank currently has (obviously if it has one or zero coins, you’re just stuck) makes the game simpler and faster. We also haven’t noticed much of a strategic hit to gameplay by getting rid of this mostly superfluous rule.
So, what do you think about these optional rule changes? Do you have any Splendor House Rules that you would like to recommend? Include them in the comments below and we’ll be happy to give them a try. Who knows, maybe we’ll have to do another article if they make the game better!
