Introduction to Splinterlands

Splinterlands is an autobattle digital card game on the Hive blockchain. The playing cards are NFTs, therefore they belong to you and you can trade, transfer or delegate them as you please. All you need to move cards and other ingame assets around is a Hive Keychain login. There are three types of battles you can play: ranked battles, brawls and tournaments. Every battle you win brings rewards, including SPS and/or loot chests containing cards, potions, packs and merits. The ingame currency is DEC and the governance token is SPS. For gladiator packs you need to earn merits through brawls and loot chests. Tournaments can bring you stacks of SPS if you play well. There are several third party card markets, including Peakmonsters.com and the best place to learn to play, in my humble opinion, is YouTube.

Getting Started

Starting off in Splinterlands after buying the Spellbook is relatively easy, even if you don’t know what you are doing (it is a lot of trial and error at first). Go to Items and look at the cards you can use. Then click Battle and put in a lineup with a good tank at the front, some magic and range monsters in the midflied and place a defensive monster in the last position. Use up all your mana, experiment around and see how you go. Be patient, you will lose a lot but don’t give up. It will be a steep leaning curve and it will be overwhelming at first. Stick with it. Once you start pulling some nice cards out of loot chests and you rise in ranking, your motivation and satisfaction will increase dramatically. Follow the tips below, invest some time in finding your way around, rent some cards and join a guild.

I have 3 tips for new players: battle diary, Splintercards.com and YouTube. When you first start playing Splinterlands, it is very difficult to make head of tail of what is happening on the battlefield, why monsters are dying here, why monsters are attacking there, and so on. There are so many different cards, so many different rulesets and abilities. Keeping a battle diary, meaning, writing down your battle lineups of battles you won and adding comments to it to remind you why you won the battle, is the most effective way to get beyond that initial confusion and disorientation when first beginning to play the game. When losing battles, note down the lineups of your opponents and learn from them. Study all the different abilities and rulesets on Splintercards.com. Go through the abilities one by one to help you understand why monsters behave on the battlefield the way they do. Once you have a general idea of a few of the countless abilities there are, go to YouTube and watch a bunch of tutorials. It will be overwhelming to digest all the information at first but with a little time you progressively pick up a lot of good tips and things begin to fall into place. Once you get out of Bronze League, you know you are going in the right direction.

Community Welcome

One of the things that convinced me that Splinterlands had a big future and would not be another rugpull like so many other crypto projects, was the vibrant and active Splinterlands community on PeakD (Hive blockchain generally), Discord, YouTube, etc. I was a bit shy at first but once I noticed that other players were more than happy to answer my many silly questions, I got to know other players in my guild and began to regularly communicate with them on Discord. One of my guild members showed me how to write a blog and today I have more than 200 posts under my belt. I follow several content creators on YouTube and PeakD and there is always something new to learn about some aspect of the game that I didn’t know before. Without the Splinterlands community at your side, your battle career will be slow, lonely and considerably less successful than if you are directly involved with other players from whose shared experience there is so much to gain.