✦ A big batch this time: the battle screen has been rebuilt from the walls up — on desktop and phones — battles got much easier to read, and the game now stops an illegal Deck at the door instead of letting it stumble into a match.
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
The walled battlefield
The battle page has a new battlefield. Your Hand stands beside the board, the three Lanes run as walled rows — Friendly, Command, Hostile — behind engraved lane walls, and the match log holds the far side. Your Archon and Lane Mana anchor each end of a row, and the two fronts meet at the battle line in the middle.
Phones got the same arena, rebuilt from the ground up. Hold your phone sideways and you get the full PC battle layout — Hand on the left, the three walled Lanes with real card art, Archons and Mana at each end. Hold it upright and the whole battlefield rotates with you: the Lanes stand as three columns with the enemy at the top, front lines meeting mid-screen, your Hand fanned along the bottom. Tap a card, tap a Lane — same one-gesture deploys as always. 📱⚔️
And those taps now land: placing a Monster by tapping the card then the Lane is far more reliable — wobbly taps still register, the countdown clock no longer swallows touches aimed at your Hand, and a tap outside the deploy window tells you why nothing happened.
Battles you can actually read
Buffs and debuffs no longer vanish between rounds. Every Monster keeps wearing its earned stacks and live stats on the board while a round plays back and through the next deployment — and the winning team's final state stays on display at the end of the match, in live battles and replays alike.
Effect icons got a real size boost and now sit on a consistent dark chip, so they read clearly no matter which card art or Lane colour is behind them — on board placards, Hand cards, and Archon plates.
Your Luck score explains itself. Rest on it mid-battle for what it tracks (enemy misses and failed procs breaking your way) and how it decides draws. New pre-battle hints cover Luck and the win condition: clear the enemy board.
The lobby, reshaped
The Battle page has a cleaner shape: Ranked and Draft sit up top with the top-prize showcase in its own gold-framed box beneath them, Practice and Private Room follow below a divider, and the ticket top-up keeps the foot of the page. Your ticket balance now lives in the top bar beside your name, and the Rating chips show all three Ratings — Ranked, Virtual Draft, and Real Draft.
Smarter doors, honest Decks
Gladiators answer to Conscript now. Gladius cards are legal only with an Archon that has the Conscript ability — they deploy only into that Archon's Lane, and only one Gladiator can fight in a Lane at a time. The Deck Builder, the Tutorial and the loading-screen tips all know the rule.
The queue tells you before it turns you away. If your saved Deck breaks a rule — like the new Gladiator rule — the queue and room doors say exactly what to fix before you search, instead of pairing you into a match that can't start.
The lobby warns you first. An illegal Deck announces itself before you battle — a clear panel names the problem card and links straight to the Deck Builder, and any battle refusal shows at the top of the lobby instead of vanishing below the fold.
Quality of life
Deck Builder filters: search by card name or ability, and filter by attack type (including multi-attack), element (including dual-element), rarity and foil — every filter also steers the +N auto-fill picks.
Auto-battle comes to the Draft queues: tick it on a Virtual or Real Draft battle and you rejoin that Deck's queue by yourself after each battle, same 10-second countdown as Ranked.
Heads-up before restarts: when we take Splinterlanes down for an update, a banner warns everyone on the site first — battles in progress finish before a planned restart.
✦ Every battle still costs a $0.01 ticket, every win still rolls for a real card, and 98% of every ticket goes back out as prizes. Something broken, confusing, or missing? Say so in the comments — that is our support desk, and it gets read.
