Review: SPLENDOR DUEL is One of My New Favorite Two-Player Board Games

Last year, Space Cowboys and Asmodee released Splendor Duel. This is a 2-player spin-off (for lack of a better word) for the popular board game Splendor. Splendor Duel was designed by Marc André and Bruno Cathala with art by Davide Tosello. The team at Asmodee was kind enough to send me a copy of the game to review, but the thoughts below are my own. You can purchase your own copy from your local game shop with an MSRP of $29.99.

I really enjoy Splendor. It’s a game that’s fun, requires quite a bit of strategy, doesn’t take too much time, and is simple to learn and teach. Splendor Duel does a killer job of taking everything I love about the original game and making slight tweaks to better suit two players. It’s possible that Splendor Duel might be better than Splendor. Let’s talk about some of those tweaks.

The biggest tweak is how gems are collected. In Splendor, you just have each color in its own pile and you can take three different colors or two of a single color. You can also take a Gold (which serves as a wild) by reserving one of the cards on the table and adding it to your hand. In Splendor Duel, the gems are laid out on a board and when you take gems, you can take up to three as long as they’re adjacent to each other. You are still limited in taking a Gold only if you reserve a card and if you take three of the same color (or both Pearls which is a new gem for Splendor Duel) your opponent gets a Privilege (I’ll talk about this in a bit). This adds another layer of strategy and thought behind your selection of gems on your turn.

Another tweak to the gameplay was the addition of Privilege. There are three Privilege tokens and they allow you to take a single gem for free on your turn. Privilege is limited though because if you want to use it, it has to be the first thing you do on your turn and it cannot be used to obtain a Gold. It’s still fairly powerful though as it allows you to get up to 4 gems in a turn, or if you’re only missing one gem to buy the Jewel card you’re after, it’s a way to speed things up a little and can definitely help you take the lead.

A third tweak is that many of the cards have an ability. The ability varies from giving you gems from the board to getting another turn to stealing gems from your opponent and more. These abilities definitely help you prioritize and strategize the various Jewel cards that are in front of you. It’s nice to feel like there’s more of a purpose to the cards you’re buying than just points. The game feels a bit more active which I enjoy.

There are a few other areas where Splendor Duel is different, but those are the main three. I really like the changes made for this game and Splendor Duel has quickly become one of my favorite two player tabletop games out there. If you’re looking for a new game to play one-vs-one, I cannot recommend Splendor Duel enough. I highly recommend it!