So I had the Fire Quest today.

Every day, I try to squeeze in a little time to knock out a quest on Splinterlands. Partly to keep myself grounded within the game. I think it's important that I maintain a connection to what the players see and hear on a daily basis. But also because it's a fun, relaxing (and addictive) game!

I absolutely love the fact that each battle only takes a few minutes. In fact, I was done with the quest in close to half an hour. I'm currently in Diamond League, so I had the benefit of some semi-decent rewards. My short session of gaming was the equivalent of someone's lunch break, and in that time, I earned 732 DEC, 5 tradeable/sellable NFT cards, and some potions.

Pretty cool.

But wait. Let's stop and REALLY analyze the nuts and bolts here. And I'm not talking about strategy or market value or any of that. I'm gonna talk about 3 Fundamental Reasons why Splinterlands is a sleeping giant...

ACCESSIBILITY

Every so often, I'll explore the best that blockchain gaming has to offer. I'll go back and check on the progress of my favorite games, or I'll seek out new games to try. It's hard to see them as competition when I genuinely enjoy gaming. I WANT blockchain games to be cool. I WANT them to be fun!

What's interesting to me is that almost ALL the other games I've tried require the player to download and install a desktop client. In turn, this means the player must have a computer capable of running the software. Ugh.

Lots of the games don't have any way for me to play on MacOS. To get around this issue, I've subscribed to the Shadow platform which allows me to play on a Windows computer remotely. This is far from an ideal situation.

Out of the games I installed, only about half seem to actually work! Either they don't download or they don't launch or the game DOES start...only for you to realize you can't even play the game without going to a website somewhere to buy something with crypto.

Take Axie Infinity for example. I only had one Axie (which I had purchased way back in the day). Apparently, you need at least three to play. So I leave the program, hit up the marketplace (because apparently you can't buy/sell from within the game itself, and come to find out the cheapest Axies are over 80 bucks!!! WHAAaaaaaat? I fiddled with the filters and tried to figure out how to get cheaper Axies to pop up on the screen. After all, this can't possibly be right. New players need to shell out around $250 just to test out the game?

I just couldn't do it. Someday I might...but not today.

Every time I go play other games, it becomes so obvious that Splinterlands is soooo far ahead of the competition when it comes to providing a game that anyone can access from any web browser. Simple. Easy. And it works! The game works really well!

From Desktop. From Mobile. Any device, any where, any time.

Splinterlands is ACCESSIBLE.

COMPATIBILITY

Most games in blockchain were built on Ethereum. And wow did they get screwed by the gas fees. The unlucky ones were destroyed by it. The rest had to adapt as best they could.

Not only has HIVE made Splinterlands a lean, mean performance machine that sprints through blockchain data like a cheetah in the wild...but we continue to add more and more and more compatible currencies and cross-integrated blockchains!

Turn your DEC into ETH or cards into WAX NFTs or pay something in BTC. Talk about chain agnostic. Splinterlands leads the pack in sheer flexibility. Currently, I believe you can link your Splinterlands account to EIGHT different crypto wallets, haha.

NFTs have been getting a lot of attention recently. And the buzz is only going to get Louder! How long before newcomers to the space get tired of staring at digital cards on the screen that don't do anything? Not only can you play games with our Splinterlands NFTs...you can also level them up, burn them for crypto, and EARN rewards with them!

One can argue that Splinterlands NFTs have more use and functionality than any other NFTs in existence. They are also more cross-chain compatible than any other NFTs.

Splinterlands is Compatible.

LIQUIDITY

Not long ago, a "whale" dumped around a quarter million dollars worth of cards on the market. The Splinterlands community went beast mode. They ate it up and said, "Please sir, I want some more".

You can now buy and sell Splinterlands cards on multiple marketplace platforms (including within the game itself--even on mobile!). As of right this moment, it looks like there has been over 5,000 card sales in just the past 24 hours.

Wanna sell cards? Someone will buy them. Wanna buy cards? Someone will sell them.

Once Land is released, players will be able to start trading resources and minting new NFT cards. It's gonna be insane.

Splinterlands is Liquid.

---

I'll keep looking for new blockchain games to try out. In fact, if anyone comes across something cool, please let me know--particularly if you think the game or project has developed a creative solution for blockchain pain points.

In the meantime, rejoice in your role as a Splinterlands first adopter. Take pride in your investment thus far, and seek out glory on the battlefield with NFTs that actually DO something fun while also earning more crypto!

HUZZAH!