Splinter Royale Academy - Make The Most Of Your Gold!

I didn't have as much time as I had hoped to play during the weekend, but whenever I have some spare time I try to squeeze in some games of Splinter Royale, arguably the project I'm most excited about on Hive right now. In my last article I talked about some basic concepts that should help you with your battles in Splinter Royale and since it was pretty well received, I want to do a follow up with two additional tricks that you need to know about if you want to make the most of the resources at your disposal - so let's get right into it!

During a match, you have very limited resources at your disposal. On round 1, you have 3 gold that will buy you exactly one monster, and after that, you'll earn one more gold per round, slowly offering you more options each round. Since unspent gold doesn't carry over to the next round, it's crucial to make the most of what you have available. Right now, there are three options to spend you gold on:

• Buy a monster for 3 gold
• Upgrade your shop
• Reroll what the shop currently has to offer.

Upgrading your shop is often too expensive and you won't always have 3 gold left to get another monster, so that only leaves you with the option to reroll your shop. But why would you that when you won't be able to afford another monster anyway? Let's look at an example:

As you can see, I have a level 3 shop and no monsters in the shop that are of interest to me. I also won't be able to buy another monster this turn. I do have another gold left, though, so I might as well hit Refresh:

While I'm now out of money, I do have an interesting option to buy with Malric Inferno. By hitting the Lock button at the top, I now can lock in that shop selection for the next round, allowing me to buy Malric right away. So in essence, each gold left at the end of the turn will offer you the chance to reroll the shop an additional time. If you don't see any monsters you want to buy next round, just reroll again and/or don't hit the Lock button. But if you see an offer you like, you can lock it in and the monster will still be waiting for you next turn.

If you do this consequently during the game, you will find it a lot easier to find what you need and also get to your gold foil monsters a lot more reliably. Speaking of gold foils, that's also an area in which you can get an additional boost if you play your cards right:

Things are looking pretty good here already, I'm still at 20 life and I just found my third Serpentine Soldier. The first impulse is to buy it right away, but in this case, that would be a mistake. When you get a third copy of any given monsters, two things will happen:

• The three copies are merged into one gold foil version
• You get an additional random monster to your hand

The second part is where it gets really interesting. The random monster is always going to be one level higher than your shop level. That means that the level of the gold foil monster itself doesn't matter. So in our example, if I buy that third Serpentine Soldier, I will receive an additional random level 3 monster, because my shop is currently at level 2. But since I have enough gold to both upgrade my shop and buy the Serpentine Soldier, I should upgrade my shop first and only then buy the card. This way, I'll receive a level 4 monster instead of a level 3 monster:

Since monsters of a higher tier are inherently almost always way stronger than monsters of a lower level, this is almost always going to give you a huge boost. My opponent will have a hard time to deal with that Frost Giant on top of my new gold foil Serpentine Soldier!

Combined with the Lock feature, it can often be worth it to upgrade your shop first, even if it means you will have to lock your shop and buy the monster one turn later. A gold foil plus an additional high level monster ahead of curve are often times all you need to completely swing a match and I've won a lot of games this way where my opponent already seemed like the sure winner of the match.

To me, it's really fascinating how deep of a game Splinter Royale actually is. At first glance, it might seem like the outcome of any match is heavily random driven and as you really can't do all that much to change what's happening. But if you start looking a little deeper, there are a lot of interesting options and strategies available that will give you the edge more often than not! If you haven't done so yet, make sure to give the game a shot, it's easy to pick up and (at least to me) really addicting!

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