Is It Worth your Time? A first look at Splinter Royale

One of the things that always excited me about Splinterlands was the possibility of it becoming more than just a single card game. Instead, I envisioned some kind of Splinterverse, a whole universe made up of different games and projects, all united by using the Splinterlands lore and (probably more importantly) assets. The article I wrote on that dates back to January of 2022. Since then, not much has happened. Soulkeep is still to be released. Splinterforge, while looking promising initially, never really managed to grab my attention. And other than that, not terribly much has been built during this bear market.

There's some hope that this is about to change finally! Today, I stumbled across Splinter Royale, a very promising looking project by @therealwolf. The reason I found the project was the proposal they put up recently, asking for funding from the Splinterlands DAO. Now I don't want to dive too deep into that part because, at least for now, I'm more interested in the actual game, but I'll give my opinion in the end. But first, let's take a look at what Splinter Royale has got to offer.

As taken from their proposal, Splinter Royale is an auto-battler, similar to Hearthstone Battlegrounds, where matches are fun and action-packed. Now I never played Hearthstone Battleground because I never played Hearthstone for more than a couple of days, but the concept is still pretty easy to understand. You are fighting in a 1v1 match against another player. Both participants start with 20 health and whoever goes to zero first looses the game. The game is played in rounds where both players first get to buy new monsters from the shop that they then assign to the board. After both players are finished doing so, both teams fight each other until only one side has standing monsters and the looser takes damage equivalent to the amount of surviving monsters and the shop level of his opponent.

As indicated above, the actual fights are resolved automatically with teams taking turns attacking each other. It is randomly decided which team starts and then one monster per team will attack at a time, starting left to right. The target of that attack is chosen randomly and both the attacker as well as the defender will deal damage to each other. This felt a little odd at first but it probably makes sense as rounds would drag on for too long if only the attacker dealt damage.

The game itself is pretty fast paced and deeper than one might expect. There are three different kinds of attacks, just as you may already know from Splinterlands. Melee and ranged both have to remove the opponents armor first while magic ignores that and directly targets the health. There are already a lot of different abilities in the game which mostly are inspired by what they do in Splinterlands. There's stuff like Shield which reduces incoming melee and ranged damage by 50%, Blast which allows the monster to also hit the opponents to the left and right of its target, or Divine Shield which negates the first time a monster would take damage.

You can freely position your monsters on the board and having the right monster with the right ability at just the right spot will often decide about victory or defeat. You can also upgrade and sell monsters and if played right, there's often going to be a lot of back and forth as both players try to counter what their opponent is currently building towards. It took me about 5 games to really understand what was going on and I've been on a streak ever since.

One match will take something between 5 and 10 minutes and once you don't have to inspect new monsters and abilities all the time, the game opens up a lot. The 17 games from the screenshot above have all been played today, so that should give you an idea about how entertaining this game is to me.

As of now, there's no information available how Splinterlands assets will be used in the game, what assets Splinter Royale will offer and how the tokenomiks are going to work. Personally, I think that's the exactly right way to do it. They made sure to build an entertaining game first, provide gameplay that's actually fun, and only then start worrying about how to integrate everything into the web 3 gaming world. Especially when looking at titles like Genesis League Goals that has awesome tokenomiks but very poor gameplay (as of now) I can only hope that other developers will follow that mantra in the future!

So as you can see, I'm pretty excited about this project and it really took me by surprise this morning. Which also might prove to be a problem, at least in terms of the current proposal. A lot of SPS holders won't know about the game and also, a lot of them won't bother to even try it out. On top of that, they are asking for $50k over an 8 month time frame. While I feel like this is a very reasonable amount to ask for, it's also a rather bad time for a proposal like that, simply because a lot of people are a little anxious right now about how things are going. So while I fully support the proposal and will also vote yes in the main vote, I don't expect it to pass as of now.

Nevertheless, I still hope that the team will continue to work on the project as indicated on the roadmap above. If done right, the game could and should bring a lot of value to the Splinterlands ecosystem so it should be in our own interest to support it as much as possible. So no matter how you guys are going to vote on the proposal, go and give Splinter Royale a shot. It's free, easy to pick up, and you just might find another entertaining game in the Splinterverse!

And that's all from me for today, thank you all for reading and see you next time!