I got my girlfriend to start playing last night and she picked it up in under and hour or two...
There's a pretty cool "tutorial mode" option now in the battles screen... Go through it, explains the basics really well.

P.S. If you have a few unopened Alpha/Beta packs, you're ALREADY (or should be) smiling with the SPS airdrop points that they're giving you... go check out https://splinterlands.com/?p=sps_management for those awesome (daily) SPS drops you'll be getting for the next year.