Splendor rules question : boardgames - reddit

Rules: Overall time limit for players is decided at the beginning (I like 3 min).
No looking at the table cards during another players turn except for when they buy a card (use your memory). Players may look over at the other players card if they want
Each player resumes their own time (other players have paused) and pauses it when their turn is over
Player must use the time necessary to buy the car they want if they choose too BUT time must not be paused until said player replaces the open space with a card from the deck.
If time runs for a player he/she must return all chips to the bank. If player is aware the he/she will have the lowest point regardless then they may put their cards at the bottom of their designated decks.
If you want something more hardcore it’s allowed to intimidate your opponents during their turn to mess up theirs thinking

Do you have to use up chips before you can use the cards as currency?

I recently played a 2 player Splendor game, wherein we got stuck with 10 coins/gems each and an unwillingness to buy any of the open cards simply because it would end up supplying the opponent with gems they need to buy stuff. This is a deadlock like situation. What should we do in such cases as per the game rules?
There are 2 cases:
1) We dont want to buy anything
2) We can't afford to buy anything
I am not sure if the answer differs depending on the case
Edit : To add more details, we had exhausted the gold pile and reservations. There were non gold gems still left but were of no use to either of us.

Hey guys, been playing Splendor a lot with new players, but someone recently pointed out a rule I completely overlooked, and it is that you can only take two of the same color if there are at least 4 gems of the same color left to take. When I ponder about it, I can't really see how using the rule or not would break the game. Any thoughts?

I'd like to find out what constitutes a tie.
An argument I had among my friends is that do points matter during the end round?
Like when the first player gets a 15 in the final round then the next players get a 16, 17 and 18 respectively. But developments also are less to most in that order.
Their argument is that points freeze at 15 and eligible winners have to face off with counting developments to determine the winner. (Meaning first player wins in the given example)
What I'm saying is that 15 only determines that the game should be ending and points are the first thing you look at in the end of the game to determine who the winner is, and in case there is a tie in the number of the highest point (18 vs 18 for example) , the person with less developments is the winner.
Could anyone chime in on this and clarify the rules for us?

I was playing on mtgo and curesed my opponent with [[overwhelming splendor]], yet when he plused his [[gideon, ally of zendikar]] he was still a 5/5 indestructible instead of a 1/1 with no text. Why?

Just played my first game of Splendor tonight. It was really fun! We had a question about the rules for buying a development - Do you HAVE to use the tokens before you apply your existing development gem value? For example if I have three red tokens and one red development, and the development I want to buy costs 1 red, do I have to return a token to the bank or can I just 'use' my existing development as payment and keep my token?

I have a question about playing Splendor.
The rules state:

On their turn, a player must choose to perform only one of the following four actions.

• Take 3 gem tokens of different colors.
• Take 2 gem tokens of the same color. This action is only possible if there are at least 4 tokens of the chosen color left when the player takes them.
• Reserve 1 development card and take 1 gold token (joker).
• Purchase 1 face-up development card from the middle of the table or a previously reserved one.

PDF of the rules here:
http://www.spacecowboys.fimg/games/splendodetails/rules/Rules_Splendor_US.pdf
Anyways, I was playing the app and I was in a situation where there were only two types of gems available. I wanted to take one of each. (Ordinarily you'd get a third as well, but since no other color was available, I was content to just take the two.) I thought it was a legal way to choose option #1 and complete the choice to the fullest extent possible.
The app didn't let me complete that move! Taking two of one color was illegal as well. I had no option to purchase. I had to reserve a card and take a gold joker in order to let game play proceed.
My question is:
Is that a bug in the app or is that actually the way the rule works?
Looking at the rules, you could interpret it as: "You must do one of these four things in totality." Since it wasn't actually possible to take 3 gems of different colors, then that first option was not allowed.
Of course an implication of that is that you must "Reserve 1 development card and take 1 gold token (joker)" in totality. Since the rules later go on to say,

If there is no gold left, you can still reserve a card, but you won’t get any gold.

I'm skeptical that the totality idea is right.

Does a Noble return to the table after your turn (so they literally are just 'visiting'), or do you keep them for the rest of the round ?
I'd assumed the latter after scanning the rules and getting into first game, but after closer reading found this to not be clearly stated.
If you only have a noble for a turn to boost points for a win it would be interesting.. but doubt this is the case!

Hi guys. So a group of my friends played Splendor tonight and they were debating one rule. Myself and another think player thing when you reserve a card you cannot use that resource (not the gold) until you buy it. Yet this other person things you can use it as the resource it is

My theory is basically that the devil (Alva) made a deal with the Meruvians (and other dreamlanders) to conquer candyass and steal the source of their power, the Orb of Splendor.
This is alluded to in the movie in Steamland.
So far, i think that when Candyass was conqured, this allowed the gates of hell to open, (which are open the entire show) and then the rulers of Dreamland were cursed.
A-Z (Azog to Zog) means the curse is up, and the prophecy will be that 1) Bean either breaks the Orb of Splendor with her finger magic, and hell stays open forever, or 2) she returns the Orb of Splendor to its resting place (making the Elves whole again, and closing the gates to hell).
Lots more here including mysteries of the Trogs, the Aquatic symbolism, references to the Orb, the secrets of The Seekers, and other dreamland lore.
Trogs and Elves used to be the same race
Disenchantment of the Orb of Splendor
Ass Above So Below

I know itll probably come out in 2020, but I've seen videos on it by Bower and Dan King and the BGG posts. I was looking for more info, esp how colorblind friendly the infinity gems looked?
Thoughts on it overall too for those who beta'd it or so?
How's the new mechanics/16 vp rules fare? And can you play regular Splendor rules with it? How's it compare?
(Pre-order for it still only says 2020 for anyone interested: https://www.chaoscards.co.uk/board-games-c800/all-board-games-c550/space-cowboys-splendor-marvel-p181059 and https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1803237/splendor-marvel-redesign)

My wife and I play lots of boardgames and we made the following adjustments to Splendor to improve it when playing with two people.

• The game ends on the round someone hits 15 points (no brainer)
• Turn the top card face up on each of the decks (they can't be purchased they just let you know what is coming up next)
• Play with a chess clock - 10mins with 20 to 30 seconds delay.

edits: grammar and formatting
edit 2: Holy cow, Thanks for the correction. We misread the standard 15 point end rule. You guys are 100% correct the rules say to end on the round that someone hits 15 points.

I am struggling to search online for the answer to my question about the rules of taking gem tokens when there are limited supplies remaining. I have just bought the physical board game but am confused because the iOS app does not allow me to pick up TWO gem tokens of different colors when there are only two colors remaining on the table.
The rules say:

On their turn, a player must choose to perform only one of the following four actions.
Take 3 gem tokens of different colors.
Take 2 gem tokens of the same color. This action is only possible if there are at least 4 tokens of the chosen color left when the player takes them.
Reserve 1 development card and take 1 gold token (joker).
Purchase 1 face-up development card from the middle of the table or a previously reserved one.

In the iOS game, if the table stock is:
1 Ruby 4 Diamond
Then the iOS game will NOT allow me to pick up 1 Ruby and 1 Diamond. The only gem pickup I am allowed to perform is 2 Diamond (because it is a "legal" move).
Furthermore, if the table stock is:
1 Ruby 3 Diamond
The the iOS game will not allow me to pick up gems (presumably because I am unable to pick up THREE DIFFERENT, or TWO SAME colors).
Is this a bug in the iOS implementation, or is this the correct rule?
Thanks in advance.

Written by Robert D. Kaplan
Tl,dr : No

Historical Reason

The root cause of these manifold failures, in many minds, is the very artificiality of Pakistan itself: a cartographic puzzle piece sandwiched between India and Central Asia that splits apart what the British Empire ruled as one indivisible subcontinent. Pakistan claims to represent the Indian subcontinent’s Muslims, but more Muslims live in India and Bangladesh put together than in Pakistan. In the absence of any geographical reason for its existence, Pakistan, so the assumption goes, can fall back only on Islamic extremism as an organizing principle of the state.
But this core assumption about what ails Pakistan is false. Pakistan, which presents more nightmare scenarios for American policymakers than perhaps any other country, does have geographical logic. The vision of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, in the 1940s did not constitute a mere power grab at the expense of India’s Hindu-dominated Congress party. There was much history and geography behind his drive to create a separate Muslim state anchored in the subcontinent’s northwest, abutting southern Central Asia. Understanding this legacy properly leads to a very troubling scenario about where Pakistan — and by extension, Afghanistan and India — may now be headed. Pakistan’s present and future, for better or worse, are still best understood through its geography.
THE MUSLIM EXPERIENCE in South Asia begins with the concept of al-Hind, the Arabic word for India. Al-Hind invokes the vast tracts of the northern and northwestern parts of the Indian subcontinent that came under mainly Turko-Islamic rule in the Middle Ages and were protected from the horse-borne Mongols by lack of sufficient pastureland. The process of Muslim conquest began in Sindh, the desert tract south and east of Iran and Afghanistan, adjacent to the Arabian Sea, easily accessible to the Middle East by land and maritime routes.
The Umayyad Arabs conquered and Islamicized Sindh in the early eighth century. Then came the Turkic Ghaznavids (based out of Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan), who conquered parts of northern India in the 11th century. The Ghaznavids were followed by the Delhi Sultanate, a military oligarchy between the early 13th and early 16th centuries, which preceded the splendorous rule of the Persianized Mughal dynasty on the subcontinent. All these Muslim warriors governed immense inkblots of territory that were extensions of the Arab-Persian world that lay to the west, even as they interacted and traded with China to the north and east. It was a land without fixed borders that, according to University of Wisconsin historian André Wink, represented a rich confection of Arab, Persian, and Turkic culture, bustling with trade routes to Muslim Central Asia.
To the extent that one area was the ganglion of this Muslim civilization, it was today’s Pakistan. Fertile Punjab, which straddles the Pakistan-India frontier, “linked the Mughal empire, through commercial, cultural and ethnic intercourse, with Persia and Central Asia,” writes University of Chicago historian Muzaffar Alam. This area of Pakistan has been for centuries the civilizational intermediary connecting the cool and sparsely populated tableland of Central Asia with the hot and teeming panel of cultivation in the Indian subcontinent. Pakistan’s many mountain passes, especially those of Khyber and Bolan, join Kabul and Kandahar in Afghanistan with the wheat- and rice-baskets thousands of feet below. The descent from Afghanistan to the Indus River, which runs lengthwise through the middle of Pakistan, is exceedingly gradual, so for millennia various cultures occupied both the high plateaus and the lowland riverine plains. This entire middle region — not quite the subcontinent, not quite Central Asia — was more than a frontier zone or a bold line on a map: It was a fluid cultural organism and the center of many civilizations in their own right.
What we know as modern-day Pakistan is far from an artificial entity; it is just the latest of the many spatial arrangements for states on the subcontinent. The map of the Harappan civilization, a complex network of centrally controlled chieftaincies in the late fourth to mid-second millennium B.C., was one of its earliest predecessors. The Harappan world stretched from Baluchistan northeast up to Kashmir and southeast down almost to both Delhi and Mumbai, nearly touching present-day Iran and Afghanistan and extending into both northwestern and western India. It was a complex geography of settlement that adhered to landscapes capable of supporting irrigation, and whose heartland was today’s Pakistan.
The Mauryan Empire, which existed from the fourth to the second centuries B.C., came to envelop much of the subcontinent and thus, for the first time in history, encouraged the idea of India as a political entity. But whereas the area of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northern India all fell under Mauryan rule, India’s deep south did not. Next came the Kushan Empire, whose Indo-European rulers conquered territory from the Ferghana Valley, in the demographic heart of Central Asia, to Bihar in northeastern India. Once again, the heart of the empire that linked Central Asia and India was in Pakistan; one of the Kushan capitals was Peshawar, Pakistan’s frontier city today.
Later on, throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern era, Muslim invaders from the west grafted India to the greater Middle East, with the Indus River valley functioning as the core of all these interactions, as close to the Middle East and Central Asia as it is to the Ganges River valley. Under the Delhi-based Mughal dynasty, which ruled from the early 1500s to 1720, central Afghanistan to northern India was all part of one polity, with Pakistan occupying the territorial heartland.
Rather than a fake modern creation, Pakistan is the very geographical and national embodiment of all the Muslim invasions that have swept down into India throughout its history, even as Pakistan’s southwest is the subcontinental region first occupied by Muslim Arabs invading from the Middle East. The Indus, much more than the Ganges, has always had an organic relationship with the Arab, Persian, and Turkic worlds. It is historically and geographically appropriate that the Indus Valley civilization, long ago a satrapy of Achaemenid Persia and the forward bastion of Alexander the Great’s Near Eastern empire, today is deeply enmeshed with political currents swirling through the Middle East, of which Islamic extremism forms a major element. This is not determinism but merely the recognition of an obvious pattern.

Indus State Vs Ganga State

The more one reads this history, the more it becomes apparent that the Indian subcontinent has two principal geographical regions: the Indus Valley with its tributaries, and the Ganges Valley with its tributaries. Pakistani scholar Aitzaz Ahsan identifies the actual geographical fissure within the subcontinent as the “Gurdaspur-Kathiawar salient,” a line running from eastern Punjab southwest to the Arabian Sea in Gujarat. This is the watershed, and it matches up almost perfectly with the Pakistan-India border. Nearly all the Indus tributaries fall to the west of this line, and all the Ganges tributaries fall to the east. Only the Mauryas, Mughals, and British bonded these two regions into single states. For those three empires, the Indus formed the frontier zone and required many more troops there facing restive Central Asia than along the Ganges, which was under no comparable threat.
Likewise, the medieval Delhi Sultanate faced so much trouble in Central Asia that it temporarily moved its capital westward to Lahore (from India to Pakistan, in today’s terms) to deal with the military threats emanating from what is today Afghanistan. Yet, for the overwhelming majority of history, when one empire did not rule both the entire Indus and the entire Ganges, the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan, most of Pakistan, and northwestern India were nevertheless all governed as one political unit. And the rich and populous Indus Valley, as close to the wild and woolly Central Asian frontier as it was, formed the pulsating imperial center of that unit.
Here, alas, is the conundrum. During the relatively brief periods when the areas of India and Pakistan were united — the Mauryan, Mughal, and British — there was obviously no issue about who dominated the trade routes into Central Asia. During the rest of history, there was no problem either, because while empires like the Kushan, Ghaznavid, and Delhi Sultanate did not control the eastern Ganges, they did control both the Indus and the western Ganges, so that Delhi and Lahore were under the rule of one polity, even as Central Asia was also under their control. Today’s political geography is historically unique, however: an Indus Valley state, Pakistan, and a powerful Ganges Valley state, India, both fighting for control of an independent and semi-chaotic Central Asian near abroad — Afghanistan.

Unstability

Despite its geographical and historical logic, this Indus state is far more unstable than the Gangetic state. Here, too, geography provides an answer. Pakistan encompasses the frontier of the subcontinent, a region that even the British were unable to incorporate into their bureaucracy, running it instead as a military fiefdom, making deals with the tribes. Thus, Pakistan did not inherit the stabilizing civilian institutions that India did. Winston Churchill’s first book as a young man, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, wonderfully captures the challenges facing colonial border troops in British India. As the young author then concluded, the only way to function in this part of the world is through “a system of gradual advance, of political intrigue among the tribes, of subsidies and small expeditions.”
The linguistic, demographic, and cultural organizing principle of the Indus Valley is Punjab, whose name means “five rivers”: the Beas, Chenab, Jhelum, Ravi, and Sutlej, all tributaries of the Indus. Punjab represents the northwesternmost concentration of population and agriculture before the ground starts to climb toward the wilds of Central Asia. As such, it is coveted because of its special access to Central Asian trade routes, though it was a frontier battleground in its own right relative to the rest of British India.
The tension between Punjabis and other Pakistanis overlaps with the tension that exists among the other ethnic groups. Chronic urban conflict in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, pits local Sindhis against Baluchis and Pashtuns, just as in Baluchistan there are tensions between Baluchis and Pashtuns. Islamic ideology, like communism in Yugoslavia, has proved an insufficient glue to form a prideful national identity. Instead, this frontier region between the Middle East and Hindu India has become an explosive amalgamation of often warring ethnic identities.
This is not, of course, how Jinnah envisioned Pakistan. He imagined a federalized state in which the various ethnically based provinces retained a high degree of autonomy. With such freedom, the angst of domination by Punjabis — and by each other — would not have existed, allowing for a civil society to emerge and, with that, a state with vibrant institutional capacity. Indeed, history shows that central authority can only be effective if it is strictly delimited. Regrettably, Pakistan has been what 20th-century European scholars Ernest Gellner and Robert Montagne call a “segmentary” society. Hovering between centralization and anarchy, such a society, in Montagne’s words, is typified by a regime that “drains the life from a region,” even though, “because of its own fragility,” it fails to establish lasting institutions. This is the byproduct of a landscape riven by mountains and desert, a place where tribes are strong and the central government is comparatively weak. Put another way, Pakistan, as King’s College London scholar Anatol Lieven notes, is a weak state with strong societies.

, to You belongs the dew of Your youth. The day they were going to sew it all up in FEMA, ACCESS DENIED. The old young ones are BURNING. When they laugh they cry.