A thing not mentioned completely is the very limited. The reserve of each gem is small especially the more players. To compound this the player has a fairly low max number of gem limit. This makes it literally impossible to buy most 1st tier cards without many cards bought to reduce the cost because it can be both more gens than your allowed to have and require more than 1/2 of all the gems of that color in existence! Expect to maybe not buy a single card like this. I do like that the more of a gem in the reserve the more you can get on your turn but this favors only some cards. I’d probably like it better if the reserve and gem limit were 2x bigger. Really weird to have a no reason why there is such a small limit to the number of gems in existence in the entire world.

Like ticket to ride many many turns and entire rounds of nothing really happening. Turns should be nearly all meaningful. Ticket to ride does have even more colors but no hand limit so draw as much as you want. Also you can almost always afford a low efficiency route somewhere for those random 2-4 of 1 color you drew. But each player does have a limit of the number of route bars so you really dont want to but only small routes unless its strategic. Splendor just feels very hallow and as post lacking more than a few strategies. Ticket to ride is more fun but even there the many turns and rounds of nothing could be consolidated with more actions per turn.

I haven’t tried any of them. I actually haven’t played Splendor in years. Just found many more interesting games instead.

I was thinking about Jaipur whilst reading this, but more on the fact that I was thinking that they probably could have packaged Splendor identically to Jaipur and reduced the box size by about 60%! Conversely I wonder whether, had Jaipur been produced in a box the size of Splendor’s, and it’s trade tokens been the same sort of poker chips… would it have been more (rightly) successful?

That’s very interesting. Now that I think about it, it does have some similar elements to Jaipur, though I think I like Jaipur a bit better. I never made the connection before.