First day playing Splinterland without any guide (EN/中文)

Been hearing about this game for quite some time but never really thought about playing it but today I've decided to give it a try. Surprisingly the game is quite fun and challenging at the same time. Challenging in a way for beginner like me that doesn't know much about the game and just YOLO'ed, whipped out my credit card, bought the spellbook and started my Splinterlands' journey. I thought instead of watching dozens of youtube videos about Splinterlands before deciding whether to play or not, might as well just hop into the game and learn about it from the inside.

听说这款游戏已经有一段时间了，但从未真正想过要玩它，但今天我决定试一试。令人出乎意料的是，该游戏既有趣又具有挑战性。对于像我这样对这游戏一知半解的新手来说，还蛮难懂的，不过我豁出去了，掏出了我的信用卡，购买了魔法书并开始了我的 Splinterlands 之旅。我想与其在决定是否应该玩这游戏之前观看数十个关于 Splinterlands 的 YouTube 视频，纸上谈兵，不如直接跳入游戏直接亲身体验。

Starting game experience was good, some npc conversations to immerse the player into the world of Splinterlands. Though my mistake was blazing through the tutorial too quickly without fully understand the game's mechanics. Despite repeating the practice session again, I still couldn't fully understand how the game works due to my slow moving brain. Naturally I was nervous before clicking the Ranked's "Battle" button, my heart was beating fast when I started my first ranked match.

刚开始游戏体验很好，一些NPC 对话让玩家更能沉浸在 Splinterlands 的世界中。不过我的第一个错误是在出在没有完全了解游戏机制的情况下过快地完成了教程。尽管再次重复教程，但由于我的大脑运转得缓慢，我仍然无法完全理解游戏的运作方式。在点击排位赛的 “战斗” 按钮之前我很紧张，开始我的第一场排位赛时，我的心跳得很快。

I started the game by choosing an Earth summoner since I saw that I needed to win 5 games using Earth Splinter for my daily quest which I'm guessing it meant Earth team. During my first ranked gameplay, I decided to choose the cool looking cards and followed the tutorial, choosing some cards from each of the categories, melee, ranged and magic. Didn't know what was really going on during the fight animations and I just won the game LOL. I thought to myself, what a lame game this is.

我通过选择土地召唤师（不知道中文的正确翻译不好意思）开始我的排位赛，因为我看到日常任务规定我需要使用 Earth Splinter 赢得 5 场比赛才能完成。在我的第一场游戏中，我没想太多，就意味着选择看起来很酷的卡片并按照教程，从每个类别中选择一些卡片，比如近战，远程和魔法。不知道在战斗动画期间到底发生了什么，我就赢得了游戏。我心想，这是一个多么蹩脚的游戏。

However, the more matches I played, the more I realized how interesting the game quickly became. Summoner will give buffs or debuffs to friendly or opponent's monsters, melee cards will only attack when it's at the first position unless with special effect that can sneak attack backline cards. Range can attack backlines and magic attack ignores shield. Also, I realized that I could choose to skip the animations and go straight to the result but I thought by watching the fights, I could better improve my team composition next time especially with the cards positioning. That's just what I concluded myself after playing several matches blindly without reading up guides or understanding how they interact with each other.

然而，我打的游戏场数越多，我就越意识到游戏的有趣。召唤师会给友方或对手的怪物提供buff或debuff，近战卡只有在第一个位置才会攻击，除非有特殊效果可以偷袭后排卡。射程可以攻击后防线，魔法攻击无视护盾。此外，我意识到我可以选择跳过动画并直接进入结果，但我认为通过观看战斗，我才可以在下次更好地改善我的团队组成，尤其是卡片定位。这就是我在没有阅读任何指南或完全了解卡牌之间的互动的情况下盲目地打了几场比赛后得出的结论。

Time flew when I played the game, all 5 quests completed in a blink of an eye and I messed around with other different summoners and cards. I had also found some discord servers with other friendly Splinterlands' players that were willing to provide info and help out so that's a huge plus. I read that just by using starter cards will be a long hard grind so my next steps would be understanding the synergy of the other summoners and cards that I haven't explored and then proceed to rent some card using the DEC that I earned from the matches to gain enough powers so I can go to the next rank.

当我玩这款游戏时，时间飞逝，5个日常任务都在眨眼间完成，我把其他不同的召唤师和卡片尝试了一遍（不是全部）。我还在网上发现了一些和谐的Discord群组与其他友好的 Splinterlands 玩家，他们都愿意提供信息和帮助，所以这是一个巨大的优点。我也做了一些研究，读到了关于仅使用入门卡的玩家将会度过一个漫长而艰难的过程，因此我的下一步将是更进一步的了解其他种类召唤师和我尚未探索的卡之前的协同作用，然后继续使用我从战斗中获得的DEC租更强的卡，这样我就可以进入下一个等级。

All in all, I had a good time playing this game for the first day. Looking forward to see how far I can go, hope that I am still not too late jumping onto the hype train now 😉. To those who might read my post, thank you for your time and everyone is welcome to point out my grammar mistakes as I am not a native speaker. Also feel free to discuss or share strategies especially for newbies like me. Peace ~