Splendor has a high initial spike, but the appeal wears off surprisingly rapidly. I've had a lot more longevity out of something like Carcassonne (measured in years) than Splendor (measured in months), when played every day. Splendor also requires a lot of concentration, which can be fatiguing.
Splendor requires focus? It plays pretty algorithmically in my opinion.
1. Is someone else about to win the game? Reserve their card if possible.
2. Can you buy a card? Buy the highest point value card you can.
3. Will taking two chips win the game? If no, take 3.
Splendor is all about efficiency (Which is why taking 2 chips is baaaad. Reserving is situationally good, but usually bad.) At higher player counts, the most efficient player almost always wins. At 2 players, reserving becomes much more strategic and isn't such a generally terrible action.
Side strategic note: Aim for the nobles with the most overlap with each other.
I agree, it's not very replayable. There is basically one strategy to win - go for the most expensive cards. They have the best action efficiency. You can get something like 5 points for 8 chips this way, or would you rather get 4 for a card that costs 14 ? Good luck accumulating those discounts. Not that it's not possible and you can't luck out with nobles, but it takes too much time.
In 2-up games, Carcassonne closely resembles a kind of grappling or wrestling, where you try to tie up your opponent's meeples, usually by making cities incompletable with the set of tiles in the box. Once you have a numerical advantage in meeples, you have an edge on the probability distribution of tiles that come out of the box - you can make more speculative bets. Whereas in 3 or more player games, it's much more rewarding to be more cooperative if you can be, because specific attacking actions are to the benefit of the player(s) that aren't involved.
Then there's the management of liquidity of meeples through the lifecycle of the game. You want to invest a lot, early; but you need to try and get them back towards the endgame, so you can steal fields and place in micro-fields.
There's a surprising amount of subtlety that emerges from the gameplay. In particular, learning how different growth patterns make your resources easier or harder to steal, or worse, block from completion.
The relative straightforwardness is exactly the appeal to me. There are nights when nothing works better. I had people over to play games last week, for example, and turns out it had been a long day for all of us and we didn't really feel like anything too involved. Carcassonne was perfect. Same with playing with extended family at Christmas. You can explain the main rules in a few sentences and everyone enjoys it.
All that said, I almost always use an expansion or two (or three) to keep things varied and add depth.
I tired of it when I realised the obvious way to get better was to learn all the tiles, so I'd know exactly when what patterns I left were blocking or not.
Learning all the tiles, and tile counting, both just seemed too dull and annoying to actually do.
I have a collection of 20 or so games, all well rated and popular on BGG, but for us Carcassonne is the most popular and enjoyable to play. It's beautiful, not too heavy, keeps everyone involved until the end. We just love it. We use three expansions: river, traders and architects, and inns. What a beautiful game!
