George Tsagkarakis
Reviewed by the CryptoGames editorial team. Last updated November 2026. This page may show ads; they never change a score. This review is informational and not financial advice: tokens and NFTs are volatile and you can lose everything you spend.
Latest update: Splinterlands SPS $0.003797 ▼ -4.9% rolls out Collector Achievements on Oct (2026-10-25) · Trajectory: growing
Splinterlands at a glance
| Genre | Card |
|---|---|
| Blockchain | BNB Chain |
| Status | Live |
| Token | SPS |
| Last major update | Splinterlands rolls out Collector Achievements on Oct (2026-10-25) |
| Our ranking | #5 |
Splinterlands has its own page in our games catalog, and you can compare it with every other title in our ranked list of crypto games.
Players say that climbing the league tiers in ranked battles unlocks reward chests, which can hold gold foil cards or scrolls. Players also report earning SPS while playing. It can be staked for vouchers, sold or burned for DEC. Tournaments, daily chests and Frontier add more ways to earn. A guild gives a reward bonus and a card library to borrow from. Players rent cards to compete, and SPS traded at $0.003886 as of 2026-11-09.
How we researched this review
This is a research-based review, not a play log: nobody on our team claims hours in Splinterlands here. We read our catalog entry, 1 official page, the official gameplay guides and store listings, 5 forum or blog pages, the public Telegram, Discord and X channels, the official update history and news coverage, token market data, team, funding and audit records (read on 2026-11-09). Every price, count and size in this review carries the date of its own reading where the source gives one. Forum posts, community chats and docs pages often carry no date: those sources are undated, and each one is linked where we use it so you can check it yourself.
What is Splinterlands?
Splinterlands is a collectible trading card game where the cards, packs and other assets are blockchain items that you own outright and can trade, rent or burn. It’s tied to BNB Chain, where its SPS governance token circulates, but the game itself runs on the Hive blockchain, which records accounts, card ownership and transfers on-chain.
You play Splinterlands in a browser, through the client at splinterlands.com, where you collect, trade and battle. Cards come in sets. Each match pits your team against a team another player has built.
Every battle sets a mana cap and one or more rulesets, such as Little League, Back To Basics or the newer Pandamonium, which starts every unit in a random position. You pick a summoner and fill your team within that mana budget, and then the fight plays out automatically with no turn-by-turn input. Your team choice and how well you read the ruleset decide who wins.
Ranked play in Splinterlands comes in two formats. Wild allows every card ever released, and Modern allows only the two most recent sets. As of November 9, 2026, Splinterlands is live.
Gameplay experience
Splinterlands is an auto-battler. You make every decision before the fight: you read the rules, pick a summoner and build a team under a mana budget. After that the battle plays out on its own.
How a match plays
A match opens on a match-found screen. Element restrictions, mana caps and modifiers as the randomized rules that make you adapt from match to match.
You have a 3-minute window to choose your cards. The summoner comes first, and it sets the Splinter, or element, of the monsters you can field. You can’t mix Splinters, with one exception: the Dragon Splinter lets you add one base Splinter.
Team selection happens on a grid of purple-framed creature cards that shows each card’s art and stats, with a red-orange battle button near the top. At the start of each battle you can view your opponent’s history of team lineups, which helps you guess their monsters and pick a counter. One example is fielding death monsters against an expected water team built on magic.
The ruleset changes which cards work. Under Ferocity, monsters with the taunt skill take double damage, so taunt units are a poor pick. Monsters with the void ability reduce magic damage.
Once you lock in, there is no turn-by-turn input. The two player portraits face each other inside a red glowing circle, and then the cards line up on both sides of a stone arena. A skip button jumps straight to the result. Lineup, speed and armor all shape the outcome, though, so skipping hides why you won or lost. Battles last just a few minutes.
Modes
- Practice battles let you learn the game and award no rewards.
- Campaign Mode is where new accounts begin. It hands out Foundations cards and unlocks Frontier.
- Survival Mode arrived in 2025 and changed how players think about their decks and collections. A July 27, 2026 news digest by @contentisking on Tribaldex calls it a fan favorite among players who want to use their whole collection without burning energy.
- Ranked leagues, tournaments and guild brawls are listed on the store page. Custom challenges let community members play each other directly.
Progression and difficulty
Battles use up Energy. Winning battles moves you up league levels, which unlocks reward chests. Daily reward chests and fortune entries sit on top of that.
Over 860 cards, each with its own stats and abilities, in variants from Gold Foils to the ultra-rare Black Foil Arcane. Each card has a detail page with a table of level rows. A Card Forge screen puts one card in the center with dropdown and quantity fields and a cost table below it.
The Conclave Arcana bloodline mechanics changed team building: players now build lineages as well as picking elements. The Starlight Foundation Set added 36 Frontier cards. Since October 27, 2026, binders award Collector Achievements for completing certain card sets, and you can show an achievement title as your profile prefix.
Watching top battles is a free way to learn the meta and see how strong players combine cards, order their lineups and counter powerful monsters. You can also skip a battle and watch earlier ones while the next opponent loads.
One cheap route is the Wild format with a rented max-level core set from PeakMonsters, rented SPS and the Wild season pass. That setup goes fairly far in Wild, but without certain cards it probably won’t reach Champion. Some cards, such as the fiends, work fine rented at level one.
Controls and platforms
You can play in the browser at splinterlands.com or in the Android app on Google Play. In the browser you use the mouse to click through card grids, stat tables and price columns.
The lobby has a blue and purple painted banner of a hooded mage, a large BATTLE button, a rank badge and side panels of guild activity. A rewards panel with counters, a timer and green action buttons sits beside the guild chat. The Practice setup screen uses dropdown selectors and an orange start button, and a land map splits a continent into colored regions.
Getting started
There is a free path. Campaign Mode gives you Foundations cards and opens Frontier, the free-to-play format. Training mode and tooltips went live in February 2025 to help new players. A tutorial campaign and the Foundation set mean new players don’t face seven years of card history at once.
The paid shortcut is the $10 Summoner’s Spellbook, which opens Modern play and tournaments right away. Without it, those open after 100 Frontier battles. The first steps in order:
- Create your account.
Graphics, art and sound
Splinterlands pairs painted, illustrated fantasy art with a dark interface of deep navy and black panels.
Art style and world
Card characters are colourful illustrated fantasy portraits, and matches play out on stone-tiled arena backgrounds. The cards sit in purple-tinted frames. Some creature art leans toward a brighter cartoon fantasy style, such as a purple winged dragon with green accents.
The homepage key art sets fire against ice, with a fiery mage and an icy dragon creature painted in orange and blue under a gold shield logo. The web home screen uses a painted forest backdrop. Cinematic art in the same painterly style shows robed wizards around a glowing orange portal and a card wrapped in fiery light streaks.
Cards can also wear alternate skins. One Halloween skin turned a card into a skeletal blue figure. Event art, such as the Grand Prix poster with five team portrait cards under a purple archway, uses the same colourful portrait look.
Interface and menus
The game runs in a web browser and also has native Android and iOS apps.
The main menu is split into four tabs: Battles, Rewards, Socials and Guild. Those tabs sit with a leaderboard panel that lists top battle matchups between players, with each side’s cards shown as small portraits.
The Play menu is a grid of painted tiles, one per mode: Ranked, Challenge, Practice, Campaign, Guild Brawls, Conflicts, Tournaments and Land. Each tile has its own fantasy landscape or character scene, so the eight modes are told apart by picture as well as by label.
Cards filtered by element. On a card’s detail page, arrows step you through cards one at a time and a dropdown switches the skin, all over a dark orange and brown fiery backdrop. Land pages have a harvest-all button, which collects resources in one click.
A lot of deck and collection work happens outside the client on PeakMonsters, a third-party site. It has a near-black theme, deck list tables, and a filter panel with a search box, type buttons and coloured element icons.
Music and sound
Splinterlands added AI-generated music, with dynamic soundtracks tied to cards, so what you hear depends on the cards in play.
Economy and earning reality
Splinterlands pays more to players who own more. The SPS paid out traded at $0.003798 as of November 10, 2026, against an all-time high of $1.06 on July 27, 2021, so each token earned is worth a fraction of a cent.
Where rewards come from
Ranked battles pay SPS. Earned SPS can be kept staked, sold, or burned for DEC, the in-game currency. Staking SPS also earns vouchers.
Climbing through the league tiers opens chests automatically. They can hold gold foil cards or scrolls, and those cards can be sold on the market for DEC. Reward cards such as Sira drop in regular foil, gold foil, black foil and gold foil arcane, and any player receiving rewards can get them.
Players also earn by farming land, flipping cheaply listed assets and crafting land cards in the Artisan Quarter with resources such as grain. Land 1.75 added three new resources, a trade hub and resource swapping. Land card crafting went live later and burns old cards, which takes supply out of the card pool.
Joining a guild adds a bonus on rewards and lets you borrow cards from the guild library. Players who rent cards can still enter tournaments and guilds, which gives them earning routes beyond ranked play.
Costs, rentals and the SPS market
Renting is the main running cost for players without a large collection. Card rentals switched from daily to seasonal terms. SPS can be rented too: a bid at a premium price fills right away, while a cheaper bid may take longer.
The team acted against botting in Modern and Frontier so that rewards go to real players, which matters in a game where reward pools are shared.
The SPS market is small. Market capitalisation was $5.17 million as of November 9, 2026, and only $2,003 of SPS traded in the previous 24 hours. Turning a large SPS balance into cash may therefore be slow. Circulating supply stood at 1.33 billion tokens against a maximum of 3 billion, so more than half of the possible supply is still to come.
Players can sell or burn rewards, and plenty put them back into cards, land or a bigger collection. One long-time player sells play-earned cards for DEC and puts the proceeds into land instead of cashing out.
SPS token review
| Ticker | SPS |
|---|---|
| Price | $0.003798 |
| Past 24 hours | ▼ 2.0% |
| Past 7 days | ▼ 4.9% |
| Market cap | $5.03 million |
| 24h volume | $2,911.23 |
| Fully diluted value | $5.03 million |
| Circulating supply | 1,327,940,171.16 |
| Max supply | 3,000,000,000 |
| All-time high | $1.06 (2021-07-27) |
Full live price page on cryptogames.gg: SPS price, chart and market data.
SPS has lost almost all of the value it held at its peak, and the market for it is thin, so holding it is a high-risk position. As of November 9, 2026, SPS traded 99.6% below the all-time high it set on July 27, 2021. A holder who bought at that 2021 peak and still holds has lost nearly all of the dollar value of those tokens.
SPS kept sliding in the latest figures. As of November 9, 2026, SPS was down 6.1% in 24 hours and down 1.4% over 7 days. Daily trading in the token is a small dollar sum, so a single large sell order can move the price.
In the game, SPS is the token paid out as a reward, and staking it earns vouchers that cut how much a player needs to rent. The market value of SPS affects what play rewards are worth in dollars and what it costs to keep a position staked.
Supply is the other risk for SPS holders. Each new token that enters circulation adds to the supply that buyers have to absorb.
Team, funding and whitepaper
| Date | Round | Amount | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-07-27 | Seed | $3.6 million | P2 Ventures (Polygon Ventures), Animoca Brands, Gate.io and 8 more |
Rounds as recorded in our funding database; each round links its page there.
Splinterlands has a public founder, and its outside money came from a 2021 seed round that a long list of crypto investors backed. Matthew “Yabapmatt” Rosen is named on the Splinterlands founders page in the official docs, which says he started developing his programming skills at the age of 10. You can put a name to the people running the game, which many anonymous blockchain projects don’t offer.
The Splinterlands seed round closed on July 27, 2021, and raised $3.6 million. The list mixed venture funds, an exchange (Gate.io) and a play-to-earn guild (Yield Guild Games), so the 2021 backing came largely from inside the crypto gaming world.
That round dates from the game’s 2021 peak. Treat the investor list as a record of who backed the project then, and don’t read it as proof of support today.
Community pulse
| Channel | Size | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| Telegram | 5,751 members | 200 online |
| Discord | 14,451 members | 2,810 online |
| X | 59,000 followers | latest post 2026-11-03 |
Discord is where the Splinterlands community gathers. As of November 10, 2026, the Splinterlands Discord server had 14,451 members, and 2,810 of them (19.7%) were online when it was read, so about one member in five was active at that moment.
The Official Splinterlands Telegram group is less than half the size of the Discord server, with 5,751 members and 200 online on the same date. For live chat with other players, Discord is the better bet.
The biggest Splinterlands audience by count is on X. The @splinterlands account had 59,000 followers as of November 9, 2026.
What players praise and how the studio talks to them
Survival Mode gets the clearest praise. In a daily Splinterlands news digest on Tribaldex, the Hive user @contentisking wrote that “Survival Mode has quickly become a fan favorite for players wanting to leverage their entire collection without burning energy.” The digest’s edition for July 27, 2026 covered the Frontier set expansion, a card called Grimdave The Unbent and a rework of Survival Mode.
The official @splinterlands account on X is how the developers announce releases. On November 3, 2026, @splinterlands posted that the Starlight set had arrived with 36 new cards, 3 exclusive pack types, 2 new abilities and an adventure in Frontier Mode. The post says the set was built alongside the community, and it pointed new players toward Frontier.
Roadmap and current status
Splinterlands is live, and it is shipping more often than a year ago. It logged 26 dated updates and news items in the 12 months to November 9, 2026, against 2 in the 12 months before, so the trajectory is growing. Its home chain is BNB Chain, with accounts and card ownership recorded on Hive, and matches run in the browser client at splinterlands.com. As of November 9, 2026, it is #5 on our ranked list of crypto games.
What shipped in 2026
In March 2026, eGamers.io reported a Splinterlands and AtomicHub partnership, with upgrades planned for the existing WAX bridge after Spielworks bought AtomicHub. The April 1, 2026 Easter update replaced SPS rewards in Survival Mode with Glint-based prizes.
The first Escalation Conflict, A Call to Arms: Snot on My Watch, opened on May 21, 2026. In an Escalation Conflict, players stake assets in Mage Wagons over a cycle of roughly 30 days. Play2Moon reported on May 29, 2026 that a collaboration with Electroneum added ElectroFox, the first double-sided card in the game.
Splinterlands ranked play changed in the autumn. After a community vote, Modern Ranked Brackets replaced the single Modern ladder with six brackets of nine divisions each, so players with small collections stop facing the biggest ones.
Back in 2025
Decrypt reported in September 2025 that Splinterlands had set up a recovery fund for players of shut-down crypto games, with $500,000 in tokens and in-game assets to unlock over seven years.
Risks
The biggest risk in Splinterlands is the token it pays rewards in. Any SPS you earn from ranked play or chests is worth a small fraction of what the same amount was worth at the top, and the dollar value of that reward can drop again within a single day.
Supply is the second risk for SPS holders. The number of tokens in the market can still grow by more than has been issued so far, and if you hold SPS, your share of the total gets smaller as those tokens arrive.
Cards and land carry their own risk. Their value depends on demand in the in-game card market, and the game keeps adding to that market and changing its rules. New sets and mode changes can change which cards players want, so a card you paid for in one season can lose its place in the next.
Before you spend money on cards, land or the paid spellbook, keep in mind that the token side of the game has already fallen most of the way from its high.
Splinterlands alternatives
Comparable games on our ranked list: Axie Infinity, Alien Worlds and Gods Unchained. Splinterlands sits at #5. Each one’s page has its genre, chain, token and current status side by side with this one.
What to watch next
- Upcoming: Splinterlands adds Collector Achievements on Oct. 27
- Upcoming: Player vote pushes Splinterlands to add brackets to Modern ranked play
- Upcoming: Splinterlands brings brackets to Modern ranked after player vote
Verdict: is Splinterlands worth your time?
Splinterlands is worth your time if you want a strategy card game that keeps getting new content and has a free way in. It isn’t worth it if money is your reason to play. The studio ships often: on November 3, 2026, Starlight arrived with 36 new cards, 3 exclusive pack types and 2 new abilities for Frontier Mode.
Who it suits
Splinterlands suits players who enjoy building a team to fit each battle’s rules. Play2moon reported that the Frontier format, which launched in mid-2025 as the game’s free-to-play offering, kept expanding in May 2026. Native Android and iOS apps are out.
Modern ranked play now splits players by collection level. Six brackets with nine divisions each replace the single Modern ladder, where players at every collection level used to face each other, Egamers reported. The October 6, 2026 weekly release fixed a problem with playing Exemplars in Modern Brackets, according to egamers’ report on that patch.
Collectors have more to chase. Binders now have Collector Achievements for completing certain sets of cards, a system that went live on October 27, 2026.
Players on a budget can rent a max-level core set through PeakMonsters, rent SPS and buy the Wild season pass. The rental setup goes fairly far in Wild, but without certain cards it probably won’t reach Champion.
Who should skip it
Skip Splinterlands if you’re here to earn. You “earn real rewards”, but SPS, the token those rewards are paid in, has lost almost all of its peak value.
Card buyers carry price risk: play2moon warns that legendary card prices are highly volatile around release windows. New sets also bring new packs: the Visions of Verico land mini-set put 250,000 packs on sale at $2 each, egamers reported in July 2026.
What would change the score
The score would go up if SPS traded more heavily than the thin volume it saw on November 9, 2026. It would go down if the release pace of the past year slows.
Frequently asked questions
Is Splinterlands free to play?
Yes. Frontier is the free-to-play format, and new accounts start in Campaign Mode, where they earn Foundations cards and unlock Frontier.
Do guilds help in Splinterlands?
Yes. A guild gives you a bonus on rewards and lets you borrow cards from the guild library for battles.
Can Splinterlands cards be traded on WAX?
Yes. A bridge to the WAX blockchain allows cross-ecosystem trading, and Splinterlands and AtomicHub announced a partnership in March 2026 that plans upgrades to that bridge.
Browse our ranked list of crypto games or open Splinterlands in our catalog.
