Splinterlanes asks a lot of a first match. There are three Lanes instead of one, six Mana pools instead of one, a Command Lane that can act twice, Monsters that cross the board when their own Lane runs dry, and all of it on a five-second clock. The How to Play guide covers every rule, but reading about a Lane is not the same as watching one fill up.
So there is now a guided first battle at splinterlanes.com.
What it is
- No clock. Every choice waits for you. Nothing is ever played for you, and a round only moves on when you have played your card.
- A gentle opponent. You face the Easy AI, which always plays its cheapest card and keeps its big Monsters for last.
- A starter Deck, dealt for you. You don't need a saved Deck, or a collection that can build one yet. Sign in and play.
- Free. No Tickets, no Rating and no prize. It's practice with a coach standing beside you.
New players see it offered at the top of the lobby. It's also on the Practice tile as a Guided button, for any time you want to show a friend the game or go through the rules again.
What happens in it
As the match plays out, a short card explains each rule at the moment it shows up on your board:
- The three Lanes. Friendly, Command and Hostile, and which side of each Lane is yours.
- Archons. Why the Archon you pick decides a Lane's colour, its buffs and its Mana. Why your Friendly Lane plays under your Talisman and your Hostile Lane under your opponent's.
- The Command Lane. Standard rules, and the double act it gets when the enemy half is empty.
- Your Hand. One Monster a round, drag or tap, and the Lanes that dim when a card can't go there.
- The Mulligan. A free redraw, once, before your first Monster lands.
- Mana. Twelve to start in every Lane, less the Archon's cost, plus two a round.
- The grace rounds. No fighting until round 4.
- Combat. What the route marks on the Lanes mean.
- Empty Lanes. Explained as it happens: when your army in a side Lane has nobody to fight and strikes the enemy Command Lane instead, when your Command Lane starts acting twice, or when yours is empty and your opponent's does.
- Second Wind. What happens when someone's whole board is wiped.
- The last round. Round 25 comes, and then the Death Battle.
Each card is a few sentences. Press Got it and it goes away. Skip the card and just play, and it goes away by itself once that moment has passed. Hide the coach turns it off for the rest of the match. The Pause and back-to-the-clock buttons work here as they do in Practice.
When the match ends, the coach points you to the next steps: build a Deck from your own collection in the Deck Builder (Auto-Build fills all fifty Monsters in one press, and rentals count as owned), practise against the AI on the real clock, and battle Ranked when you're ready, at one Ticket a match with a prize roll on every win.
Also new since the last update
- The front page shows what you can win. A Real Prizes panel shows the current top prize in the pool and a look at the board, and the page opens without waiting for the card catalog to load. The Prizes page now loads 60 at a time, with a Show more button.
- Signed out, the top bar is useful. It links How to Play, the Ladder, the Gallery and Prizes (on a phone they're in the ? menu), and the Splinterlanes name takes you home. The Ladder is centred on the page, and the phone sign-in field shows in full.
- The Gallery and Prizes open on someone. Signed out, with no name given, they show the Ladder's #1 player's record instead of an empty search box. You can look up anyone else from there.
- Clearer battle words. Your Hand names each card's splinter (Fire, Water, Earth, Life, Death…), and the header names the phase in the game's own terms: Archons, Placement, Death Battle.
- A roomier Deck Builder. It uses the full page width: about ten cards to a row on a laptop or desktop, and every card name and Bloodline reads in full.
- Tidier pages. Match History lines up with the rest of the site, and a line with a 🎟 Ticket in it no longer sits further from its neighbours than the rest of the paragraph.
If you have a friend who has been curious about Splinterlanes, send them the guided battle first. And if a coach card ever says something that doesn't match what you see on the board, comment below. This blog is where we look after the game, and we read quickly.