Close your eyes, and take a trip down memory lane, specifically your teens. Remember showing off and trading Pokemon cards? Spending hours after school on the massively popular Magic The Gathering or the Hearthstone games? or even the fan-favorite Gwent minigame from the revolutionary The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt videogame?
Now, imagine this but add in a bit of modern advancement and technologies gift to mankind to let you earn while you enjoy doing what you do, and bam! You are back at the glory days of building decks and card battles, but you earn from it this time.
What is Splinterlands?
Splinterlands is a play-to-earn card battle game inspired by classic games of the same genre like Hearthstone, Gwent, and Magic The Gathering, to name a few.
Build your deck of complex and intricate units and duke it out against other players to become a spliterlands master. Utilizing the hive blockchain, the game lets the player earn daily by rewarding player participation and skills through events and tournaments. Splinterlands is available to play on Android, iOS, and Web Browser.
How to play Splinterlands?
Download the game on your preferred platform and create your account to get started with the game. It’s free to sign up. You will be lent a few sets of cards when you join to help you get into the game.
You can also join the game’s official discord and rent or borrow a few cards before you start building your deck. However, you must invest a minimum of 10 USD to acquire the summoner spellbook item that lets you make your own NFT decks. It is all the investment that is required at the moment.
The rest of the game depends on battles and loot, so let’s get right into it.
The Cards
There are two main types of cards in the game: Summoners and Monsters
- Summoner cards allow you to summon varieties of monsters with varying stats based on the card rarity.
- Monster cards are the monsters summoned by the summoners. These are the cards that you will use for combat.
Splinters
Splinters are the various factions in the world of Splinterlands. The summoner cards from each faction summons different creatures with varied stats based on the faction they’re affiliated with. The six different factions in the world of Splinterlands are known as splinters.
Card Anatomy
Shown below is the anatomy of a creature card and what each label means:
- Mana cost: Mana cost is the amount of mana used by the card to initiate an attack. Different attacks consume different amounts of mana points.
- Stats: Stats consist of attack types and damage, speed, armor, and health points.
- Splinter: The icon in the splinter section refers to the faction the card belongs to, and the color determines the card’s rarity in terms of loot and value in the marketplace.
- Name: Shows creature name.
- Level: Displays character level. As the character keeps leveling up, it begins to learn new devastating moves and techniques.
- Experience: A green bar that fills up after every battle shows you how much progress is needed to advance your card’s stats to the next level.
- Abilities: Displays your cards’ abilities. More are added as you level up.
Battles
Now comes the meat of the gameplay, the battles. Once you have practiced enough in the tutorial modes and have gathered a strong deck of cards, you can participate in real card battles with other online opponents.
These battles usually start with a menu board that displays some info about your enemy and vice versa. The battles last for 2 minutes and have various battle conditions that you and your opponent must follow during the faceoff. Conditions are randomized after each battle and can have various conditions like prohibiting certain monster types or moves or limiting abilities.
The game takes place in a customized 6:6 battle grid where you and your opponent will be placed on either side. The post titled summoner is reserved for the summoner class to summon monsters in battles. The post 1 grid can only be occupied by characters who deal melee damage, but it does not prevent the character from being placed there even if it can deal ranged damage.
However, every other post can only be occupied by cards dealing a range of damage, whether physical or magical. So a good amount of strategical depth is added to the gameplay. You have to carefully pick the cards that match the summoner faction, has an advantage in their position, don’t outnumber the mana consumption points, and have a solid defense.
NFTs and Earning Money
While being a fun and engaging game, the cards in the game also have other uses, specifically if you want to make money off of them.
The assets in the game can be sold and traded as NFT in the marketplace and are cross-compatible with other blockchains. The main assets in this game are Cards, Potions, Dark Energy Crystals (DEC), and Splinterland Shards (SPS).
To earn more, you need to constantly play and rise the leaderboard, as the higher you are on the leaderboard, the more you earn.
Try to earn as much DEC as possible but be mindful that the more victories you get, the lesser DEC will be awarded since drop rates decrease by 1% per win.
