Hello, fellow board gamers. It's yingying.
Picture a purchase in Splendor. You pick out three gem tokens and push them back into the supply, ready to take the development card with the red bonus from the middle of the table. The person across from you is watching it too, but their eyes are on the top-right corner. With this card, you'll have three red cards in front of you. Their gaze travels up that column toward a Noble tile. It still calls for other colors, but you've just met its red requirement.
Two pairs of eyes follow the same card. One is looking at what goes out today. The other is looking at what you'll pay less for from now on. Nobody announces an increase in their discount. You can say nothing at all. When the card lands in the right place, other people can see the change.
The last time I wrote about Splendor, I was interested in how one little card could lighten every step that followed. Today I want to see what that feels like on the table. A token and a card both show a gemstone. Why do we so rarely mistake one for the other? I'm looking at the base game in Space Cowboys' tenth-anniversary redesign. The scenes at the table are examples of how layout and actions work together.
I. Why Give the Same Color Two Different Forms?
1. A Gem That Leaves Your Hand
With a stack of blue tokens beside you, the most direct way to count them is to separate them with your fingertips. To pay, move the ones you need out of your stack and back into the shared supply. Your little pile gets shorter, the one in the middle gets taller, and someone beside you might take those very tokens on their turn. One purchase changes the picture in two places at once.
Sometimes we like these round pieces because picking them up feels like holding a bit of cash. What interests me more is that you can push them across that stretch of table. There is no formal boundary between the center and your play area, yet players can tell who can use a token from where it lands. A number beside your hand could go down and the purchase would still work, but the whole table would lose a chance to see where the money went.
2. A Gem That Stays Put
A sapphire on a card can also cover the cost of one blue token. But when you buy another card, you don't give up the one that provides the blue bonus. The bonus stays in front of you for the next purchase. Even when your blue bonuses exceed the blue cost, you don't get the difference back in tokens. The cost of that color simply goes down to zero.
Reusing the symbol helps players see that the two can match. Putting it on things with different shapes and different destinations shows that they last for different lengths of time. Suppose a new card costs three blue and you own two blue bonus cards. There is one blue token to push away. You see blue three times, and you do one subtraction. The two blues on paper stay, and the one under your fingertip leaves. A sentence can explain the rule. Your hands can tell the story again.
II. What Should a Card Give Up After You Buy It?
1. Price at the Bottom Left, Bonus at the Top Right
While a card is in the market, its bottom-left cost is worth a close look. You compare each color with the bonuses you own and the tokens you can pay. The gem at the top right answers a different question. If I bring this card home, which color will it save me on my next purchase? Prestige has its own corner, and the illustration fills the middle. Your eye can enter through the picture, then come to rest on three questions, each in its own place.
After the purchase, you read the card in a different order. The price you were weighing a moment ago is a bill you've already paid. It stays on the card and can yield the table's attention. The bonus and prestige will come up again and again. The new rules suggest arranging purchased cards in columns by color and overlapping them vertically so the prestige and bonuses stay visible. I like that little suggestion. It gives the card face two jobs at two different times. Open it up for shopping, then tuck part of it away for counting.
2. How Much Should Stick Out?
Suppose you've bought four cards of one color. You could lay them all out like an exhibition, with none of the four illustrations covering another. But as all five colors arrive, that table space has to make room for dishes, elbows, and other people's cards. Overlapping the cards brings them back into a space you can scan in front of you. Overlap them too far, though, and a corner at the top disappears. Leaving only gems visible makes counting colors easy. Leaving only points visible might be enough to track the endgame. With both showing, someone can answer both questions in a single glance.
If I were making a paper prototype, I'd start by covering most of a purchased card with a blank sheet to see if the strip that's left can do its job alone. Then I'd overlap four or five cards by different amounts and look from another chair. From your own side, finding a symbol is easy. From diagonally across the table, can you still tell one card's top edge from the next? The part of the layout most worth changing might be just the distance between the corner symbol and the cut edge. Those few millimeters barely register on a single card lying flat. They matter on every card in an overlapping column.
III. Two Ways to Read the Middle of the Table
1. Look Across to See What You Can Do Next
The market gives its three levels three rows, with four face-up development cards in each. Buy or reserve a card and another from the same deck takes its place. A gap remains when that deck runs out. You can start by looking across one row. If you've just worked out that you're two tokens short of one card, you can look beside it and start comparing another. You still have to see which card came in, but nobody has to search for where it will show up.
To me, the card positions and the path you take to check prices are the fixed parts. The illustrations and combinations worth lingering over are what change. Imagine adding each new card to the far end of the row and sliding the others along. You'd still have a tidy line, but after every purchase you'd have to find the card you were just looking at. Replacing cards in place separates what moves from what stays still. You see the change and still recognize what hasn't moved.
2. Look Up to See Which Column Is Growing
The Noble tiles sit above the market, with the colors and quantities they require visible to everyone. They count bonuses from purchased cards. A pile of tokens can't meet those requirements. Think back to the red card in the opening. The person across from you sees the ruby at the top right, looks toward the red column in front of you, then looks up to the Noble tile. They've read the same piece of information on three different objects, but each glance asks a different question. What is it? How many do you have? What are you still missing for that tile?
Imagine inventing five symbols unrelated to gems for the Noble requirements. They might look more like heraldry, but players would have to translate them. Make the Noble tile look like a token, on the other hand, and a newcomer might assume they're supposed to pay for it. I see a narrow path here. The same gem has to be recognizable, while its surroundings tell you whether you're looking at money you hold for now, a bonus you've already earned, or a condition you still have to meet.
IV. Which Entries Should the Picture Keep?
1. Let Some Information Recede with the Action
A card that asks for the same amount of attention from start to finish can get tiring by the second half of a game. Imagine leaving every purchased card's full price on display. Old bills would pile up. It might look transparent, but other people would still have to pick out the few things that matter now. Overlap the cards and put the old prices out of sight, and that small stretch of table can go to bonuses and prestige that still count. When you want to see the pictures again, you can spread them out before packing up.
That echoes what happened to the three tokens at the start. The ones you paid went back to the middle, where they could be somebody else's money next round. The price you already paid stays on the card and recedes from view. One move sends away something you held for a little while and brings something that will keep working closer. To me, that moment has more layers than writing a bigger number on paper. The red column in front of you isn't very wide, but you can imagine what it will save you the next time you reach out.
2. The Kind of Order I Want to Keep
When I lay out a draft card, the complete image can be very persuasive. The price sits neatly, the illustration has room to breathe, and the title feels right. But it's what the card looks like after it leaves the mock-up that makes me want to revise it. A corner cuts off at the table's edge, another card covers half the image, or someone scans it quickly from across the table. All of that belongs to the finished design. Painting something worth lingering over takes care. So does letting players move on without having to stop and read it again every time.
If I ever designed cards like these, I'd want players to enjoy the image when they buy that red card, then slide it smoothly into a column. In that little slide, the information that still matters comes forward, and someone else gets a moment to understand what you might do next. That's something I love about Splendor. A lot changes through everyday gestures. The table stays quiet, and somebody is always reading it. The quieter the picture, the more it's worth reading from two different chairs.
A question for the table before I go. If you had just a narrow strip of space, how would you arrange your purchased cards in Splendor? Would you want people to read the number of bonuses in each color first, or the prestige on each card? If you wanted to keep both, how much of the illustration would you leave showing? I'd love to see a layout you've actually used, or hear about the detail you'd redraw.