[banannaise]

I've played a lot of four-player Splendor, and went two years and three tournaments without losing a game. One of the lessons from that is this: Even if three players are all jockeying for the expensive cards, it is still a losing strategy for the fourth to try to build an engine.

Good players playing against other good players will often grab one or two cheapies in the midgame to deal with resource scarcity. But you simply cannot win by buying cheap cards, building an engine, and picking up nobles. It's just that much slower.

The metagame in Splendor is more subtle, as you say. It's about clever play interaction and depends heavily on the early-game tableau. Does the tableau strongly favor a single color? Then your choice is to jockey for position on that color, or avoid the resource scarcity and go for weaker and/or less-coordinated cards. Does it have a lot of strong cards? Then it's about finding one or two you can get without someone else tying up your resources. Does it have a lot of weak cards? Then it's about finding ways to gain an upper hand for when the stronger cards come out.

Are players holding a lot of chips? Then you need to avoid getting stuck with a poor "hand" of chips - either a full hand that can't buy anything useful, or an empty hand when the chip supply is weak. Are they hoarding the wilds? That's much like the above, but with even more pitfalls.

Unfortunately, there's a skill ceiling to Splendor, and it's fairly low. Once you approach it, improvement is asymptotic, and the luck element of the game spikes tremendously. These days, I don't really like playing without the expansion. But in good news, the expansion refreshes the game wonderfully.