Splinterlanes Update — play at your own pace
✦ This batch hands you the clock. Practice and free rooms can now pause mid-battle or drop the timers entirely, the Easy AI finally deserves the name, and the Tutorial is illustrated end to end — learning Splinterlanes has never been this unhurried.
New here? Splinterlanes is three-lane battles for your real Splinterlands collection: tickets cost $0.01, winners roll real cards, delivered on-chain. How to play · Battle now
Pause and Turn-Based ⏸♟
Free play now runs on your time, with two new buttons on the battle screen:
- Pause freezes the whole match clock — deploy timers, the works — and waits for you to come back. Kettle's boiling, kids are calling, no problem. Either player can pause or resume.
- Turn-Based goes further: no timers at all. Every choice waits until you have made it, and each Round resolves once everyone has played. In a private room both players must agree to switch it on — and either can bring the clock back at any time.
Both live in Practice matches and free private rooms only. Ranked, stakes and the Sealed/Draft queues keep their fixed pacing — where tickets are on the line, nobody waits on anybody.
An Easy AI that deserves the name 🐣
A new player with a starter collection got flattened by the "Easy" AI — that's not what easy is for. Now it's a true soft target: it fields a Deck levelled well below yours and leads with its cheapest cards, so a brand-new player can fumble through their first battles and still win them. Medium and Hard keep their level-matched Decks and sharper play — the ladder now has three honest rungs.
Pair it with Slow Mode or the new Turn-Based switch and Practice becomes the gentlest place to learn the Lanes.
The Tutorial, now illustrated 🖼
The How to Play guide — on the site and in the pinned post — now shows the game while it tells it: screenshots of the board, the Deck Builder, the Archon picks, the Mulligan, Second Wind, Talismans and the lobby, right where each concept comes up.
And if you'd rather see the game than read about it at all: A View of Splinterlanes walks the whole thing as a picture tour.
Deck Builder — the splinters, by name 🔥💧
- Fire, Water, Earth, Life, Death, Dragon, Neutral — the Auto-Build panel now calls the splinters what Splinterlands calls them, each name wearing its element's colour.
- The +1/+10/+50 auto-fill now lands you on the In Deck tab, scrolled into view — you see exactly what it picked the moment it picks it.
- The moment your Deck reaches 3 Archons + 50 Monsters, the builder prompts you to save — with the Save button glowing so the last step never gets missed.
Small things that matter
- The top menu stays with you: on long pages like the Deck Builder and the Tutorial, the navigation bar (and the Deck Builder's save bar) stay pinned while you scroll — no more climbing all the way back up to reach a button.
- History is now a drop-down holding both your Match history and your Prize record — click History itself to land on your matches.
- The battle screen learned small laptops: on narrower screens the Archon compacts into a slim column with its Lane Mana, handing the width to the Monsters doing the fighting. The placement clock speaks with one voice too — the drag hint rides the clock itself, and it dims while you wait on your opponent instead of flashing gold at you.
- The Mulligan button stays in sight: on laptop-height screens it could sit out of view below the Hand — it now floats at the bottom-left of the battle screen until your first placement.
Seen something odd, or have an idea? Comment below — player reports drove most of this post (the Easy AI, the Mulligan button, the small-laptop layout all came from you), and we read every one. ⚔️
