We have run into a similar issue, someone came to one of our hive meetups wanting to find out about crypto, so we got talking and showed him the splinterlands game, he liked the idea of earning crypto for playing a game, do you think we could gift him a spellbook and by proxy a hive account. very difficult.
Hopefully splinterlands are revamping the new player experience to make this better.
I don't think there will be problems gaining access to accounts via splinterlands as they only used paid accounts - but someone will have to pay for the 'spellbook', yes.
We got there in the end, but there was three of us fiddling around for about an hour, has to be an easier way