Greetings readers,

I have to admit that at first glance Splinterlands' art does not entirely appeal to me. My biggest draw to a card game is the card art and effects and Splinterlands falls short in both departments. However, one should never judge a book by its cover (unless it is a science-fiction book. if the cover is bad, run away!). So I decided to give the game a try and here is my honest opinion of the first few hours of play.

1. Tutorial

The tutorial experience is short and useful. Gives you the very basics of the game and allows you to start playing right away. Where I feel it could do better is when it comes to splinter differences. The only reference is that the enemy AI is playing Death, which is a slow hand, you should play Fire. 

2. First few games

While the tutorial is short and good overall and it teaches you how to play the first games will be brutal. Compared to the more well established card games like Hearthstone, Magic: The Gathering etc. Splinterlands gives you almost nothing to start with - just some very basic cards which as soon as you hit Ranked games at the lowest rank will prove useless in most games. The only thing you have going for you is RNG and the fact that the games are really quick. So you can just mindlessly plow away, hoping that you will get a few wins here and there. The main difference with the other card games is that even at the lowest possible rank you are encountering players with cards not available to a fresh player. Maybe the experience was better a few months ago when the game was newer but for the time being I must say this start has to be one of the more frustrating from my card game experience.

Buying the spellbook for 10 USD unlocks more functionality in the game, like rewards, quests etc. and allows you to purchase packs. Other than having extreme luck with the rewards spending money is the only way to be able to win games and increase in rank.

3. First quest completion

After you purchase the spellbook you get access to daily quests. These seem to be the basic kind of quests: Win 5 ranked games with x splinter. As these are limited to ranked games and not practice games you are back to the grinder to get lucky and get 5 wins. I finally managed to get the 5 wins after a total of around 50 games played with the same faction. The battle log does not show all of the games played unfortunately. Out of these 5 victories all were due to surrenders. 

4. Conclusion

I am aware that I am far from being good at this game and that positioning of your cards and the overall strategy matters more than the cards themselves. While this is certainly true to an extent there are not many strategic options available with a handful of cards. Which means that in order to improve you either need to spend money to buy packs or cards off the market or you simply need to grind it out. Don't have an issue with grinding per se but unless the experience slightly improves in the following weeks I doubt I would have the grit to keep going.

Have any of you recently started playing Splinterlands and experienced similar challenges? If yes, how did you overcome them? Would love to read your comments below.

Take care

Alex