Splito – Making the Family Share

If your family is like ours, there’s a good chance your kids don’t always get along. Even when we come around the dining room table, getting our kids to be kind and share with one another isn’t always a slam dunk. If you need a little bit of help getting your family to share, it might be time to deploy Splito.

Splito is a unique tableau management game designed by Luc Remond and Romaric Galonnier, and published by 25th Century Games. Splito comes equipped to handle group sizes up to eight and ages as young as eight. Because of its simultaneous play, the game takes around 15 minutes regardless of player count.

So, whether you have family and friends in town, or a pretty full quiver at home, your needs are covered.

Setup

Splito is a single deck of cards containing Objective cards and Splito cards. Pick an Objective with a moon and an Objective with a sun. Place them face-up in the middle of the table. Deal 13 cards to everyone. Put the rest of the deck in the box.

Gameplay

Splito is a split tableau drafting game. During each round, all players simultaneously choose a card from their hand. When everyone has chosen, players simultaneously reveal their cards and which tableau they’re playing it into. One of the unique features of Splito is that a player’s tableaus exist between them and the players to their left and their right. Neighbors need to work together to build their shared collection to score the most points.

The cards may be Objective OR Splito cards, setting up more private point conditions or working toward fulfilling the existing ones in that tableau. The two objective cards in the middle are public: whichever tableau best accomplishes them wins those points as well. Objectives have diamonds on the upper corners representing the difficulty of the objective and the number of points a tableau will earn by completing it.

After playing a card, all players pass their hand to the left. Once everyone has played all 13 cards, tally up the scores for each tableau. Don’t forget to award the center Objectives as well! Each player multiplies the scores of the two tableaus they’ve contributed to. Whoever has the most points wins!

Two-Player Variant

In the “duel” variant of Splito, play is similar with just two slight changes. The game lasts 26 rounds instead of 13, and rather than sharing zones with opponents, each player manages their own two scoring zones.

After choosing the two cards to display as end game public scoring objectives, players follow the set-up for a four-player game. One player shuffles the cards and deals four hands of thirteen cards, giving each player one hand and then placing the other two hands in the spaces between them. Players select and play a card in one of their two zones, move the hand to the empty space on their left, and pick up the waiting hand to their right. The game continues in this manner, until all cards
have been assigned to zones and are ready to be scored. Players claim their earned public objectives, add up the points earned in each of their two zones, and multiply them together for a final score.

Impressions

Andrew Says:

One of the first things I noticed about Splito is that it forces collaboration. A player has to torpedo their own potential victory if they want to “take it out” on a neighbor. Shared success contributes to personal success. There’s a life lesson to learn here too but for now I’ll just rest on Splito being a fun game.

Splito is a game of influence, so it’s an opportunity for an older or more gregarious sibling to use their charisma for good, rather than evil. Once again, I’ll take any opportunity for encouraging healthy interactions with my kids. In theory, players aren’t supposed to tell each other what is in their hand or imply in any way what they’re going to be playing. This makes policing silent communication a pretty entertaining part of playing the game as well.

I also really appreciate how simple Splito is to set up and play. 13 cards is a lot, but they’re very easy to categorize. The deck is a mix of Objectives and Splito cards, so getting going is super fast. Everyone understands the game within a round or two.

Stephanie Says:

I tested Splito mostly at two players. No new cards are introduced throughout the game, so our turns became meaningless when we ran out of scoring objective cards to choose from or number/color cards to play for our objectives. Not getting necessary cards is a common frustration with drafting games, but it felt more pronounced here, as we passed hands and chose cards that didn’t serve us for several turns until game end.

With so many incredible card games that work well for two, I wouldn’t pull Splito from the shelf at this player count. After our games with two and three players, our impression is that for a fun game of Splito, more is truly the merrier, so we recommend saving this one for a festive family gathering or a game night with friends.

Final Thoughts

Maud Chalmel’s abstract art is lovely, and the different patterns help with any potential colorblindness issues. The iconography is simple and understandable, the numbers are large, and the all-caps text is easy to read. Objective cards are all grey, making them easy to discern from the Splito cards.

25th Century made a wise decision in card size, too. Despite being much thinner than a playing card, they’re large enough to easily display the necessary information while being small enough to hold a full complement in hand.

This small box game has a definite place on our shelf, available to bring a larger group of players together who don’t want to dig into a multi-hour affair. It’s a pleasant, quick, unique game. You can get your own directly from 25th Century Games, from Amazon, or from your Friendly Local Game Store.

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25th Century Games provided The Family Gamers with a promotional copy of Splito for this review.

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