I bought the computer version of the Splendor board game (through Steam) in December. I’ve had the board game for a couple years and like it, but this pandemic situation has limited my ability to play. The computer game lets me play against the computer locally or humans online. I’ve been playing quite a bit the last few days.
I’ve won all but one of the games I played. I normally have used a strategy focusing on going for the nobles with the most common colors, building an “engine” along the way to allow me to also get some point cards. The one time I lost I was putting a lot of my focus on blocking the opponent (was two player) from getting nobles and lost track of ensuring I myself got enough.
I play too slowly to feel comfortable trying online play. I’ve been playing repeatedly to try to become more comfortable and speed up my play, but am still not very fast. I’ve been looking for strategies to at least reduce the number of turns I need to win. I found several suggestions of using the “go big” strategy where you focus solely on getting point value cards quickly, such as in this guide and a couple others I found. That seems complicated and somewhat dependent on luck and other player actions.
I played one four player game like this, starting with four because it seems more likely to be able to get enough chips for the big cards. I did win, with 8 cards in 25 turns, but just barely: only by three points and that player probably could’ve won if they were a human and saw my strategy. It definitely seemed hard to see a clear path, at the beginning and even as I went, as the colors didn’t seem to stack so nicely. Those 5-7 token one color cards were rare and too likely to be a different color set than I was set up for. I ran into a bottleneck with the 10 token maximum several times and was forced to pick first tier cards. Anyway, since it looks somewhat promising to reduce my turn count, I think I will try it some more, but still feel more comfortable with my noble strategy.