Splendor™: The Board Game

UPDATE: As others have said, there has been zero response to any bug reports or complaints. Be forewarned before spending any money on this game! I feel like it completely broke not longer after I bought expansions. With a developer that has stopped responding in any way, this now almost feels like fraud. I just upgraded to the new 7th gen (10.2”) ipad, and this game is now unplayable due to it’s inability to handle a different screen size. As other reviews have said, it appears that you can get the app to respond by clicking in a location offset from the intended target, but this makes playing the game impossible. Prior to getting my new iPad, I played this game multiple times per day, but I’m not going to be able to play again until this issue is fixed! A bigger issue is that Asmodee appears to have lost their collective mind as game developers. First they completely broke one of my OTHER favorite games in Pandemic, and now Splendor is trash. They’ve somewhat recovered in Pandemic (it’s still nowhere near as good as before). Given that screen resolution issues shouldn’t be a big deal to fix, I’m mildly hopeful they’ll fix this soon. Before dropping any money on Asmodee games, however, I highly recommend reading the most recent reviews of their titles. For users like me who have purchased expansions, it’s been incredibly frustrating!

This has been one of my favorite adaptations of a board game for years. Aside from some bugs that never got addressed (like how if there are four of one color of token available and less than four of one other color it forces you to take two of the first color instead of allowing you to choose one of each), it has been a faithful rendering of a great board game. The AIs behave well (the don't gang up on you the way they do in Settlers if Catan). The graphics are quite good. And they have been rolling out the expansions (slowly but surely). However, the Trading Posts update is incredibly unstable. I have to launch the app multiple times to get it to fully launch. If any kind of notification from another app comes into my phone, the app chokes and quits. If I flip my phone over so the cord is on a different side while it is launching the app chokes and quits. It has forgotten who I am, lost all of my player history, and occasionally seems unaware that I have already bought all of the available expansions. If you have the previous version, just stick with it until the developers get this fixed. It is nothing but a source of frustration now.

This is a really fun and fantastic game, the challenges are great for keeping it interesting too. I’ve reduced my rating by a star because the user account has issues. It was always disconnecting and making me log in every time, but I didn’t really have to be logged in unless I wanted to play a particular set of challenges so it wasn’t a big deal. However recently the updated it and it wiped all of my scores for the main game and all of the challenges, and when I tried to log in hoping it would restore it they had lost my account information on their servers. So I had to make a new account and start over; this time it actually stayed logged in which was nice; but after a week or two I was not logged in when I went into the game and found out my account information was lost again. I still have my scores but I’m sure they’ll eventually update and wipe them again, and even if I make a new account they’ll just lose it again. I’m so sick of this.