Riftbound is the League of Legends trading card game, released on October 31, 2025. It plays with 2 to 4 players: you pick your champion, send them into the fight alongside your army and your spells, and take control of battlefields to win.
The goal
Battlefields are the ground you fight over. Each player brings one into the game, but once play starts, they're all up for grabs.
You move your champion and your units in to take control. Each time you claim one, you score a point, and every turn you hold it, you score another. First to 8 points wins the game, or 11 in a team game.
Building your deck
A complete deck is four separate pieces:
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1 Champion Legend, placed in the Legend Zone. It sets your deck's Domain Identity: a card is only legal if all of its Domains are covered by your Legend.
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A Main Deck of at least 40 cards, including your Chosen Champion. Up to 3 copies of any one card name, and no more than 3 Signature cards total, all carrying your Legend's champion tag.
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A Rune Deck of exactly 12 runes, shuffled and kept separate from your Main Deck, and subject to the same Domain Identity.
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Battlefields. You bring 3 during deckbuilding, but only one goes into play.
Your Chosen Champion has to be a champion unit whose tag matches the one on your Champion Legend. A Signature unit can never fill that slot.
The six Domains
Fury (red), Calm (green), Mind (blue), Body (orange), Chaos (purple), Order (yellow).
Choosing your Legend
This is the most important card in your deck, the one everything else is built around. It determines which Chosen Champion you can play, the one that starts faceup on the board and fights for you, and it defines the domains, or colors, of the cards you're allowed to include. In Origins, every Legend has two domains.
Your Legend and your Chosen Champion set your strategy. Around them, you've got more units to send into the fight, including other champion units, spells to swing a battle your way, and gear to make your team stronger.
Runes: your resource
Every card in your deck has a cost, paid with runes from a separate side deck. You get two per turn, and you can use them two ways: turn them sideways to cover a normal cost, or send them back into your Rune Deck to pay for your more powerful cards.
Runes produce two things. Energy pays numeric costs and has no domain. Power pays domain-specific costs. So a basic rune has two abilities: exhaust it for 1 Energy, or recycle it into your Rune Deck for 1 Power of its domain.
Anything you don't spend is lost at the end of the turn.
Setup
Legend in the Legend Zone, Chosen Champion in the Champion Zone, battlefields set aside, both decks shuffled separately. Turn order is decided at random.
Each player draws 4 cards, then takes their mulligan: set aside up to 2 cards, draw that many, then recycle the ones you set aside to the bottom of your Main Deck. No reshuffle.
How a turn works
The first four phases follow an A-B-C-D sequence:
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1. Awaken: ready everything you control.
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2. Beginning: score your Hold points for the battlefields you control.
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3. Channel: channel 2 runes from your Rune Deck.
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4. Draw: draw 1 card. Your Rune Pool empties at the end of this phase.
Then comes the Action Phase, which has no fixed structure. You play cards, activate abilities and move units, as much as you can pay for.
At end of turn, units are healed, "this turn" effects expire, and your Rune Pool empties.
Moving your units
Units always enter the board exhausted. To move one, you exhaust it: that's the cost of the Standard Move. It takes a unit from your base to a battlefield, or back from a battlefield to your base.
The Ganking keyword adds one more option, moving straight from one battlefield to another.
One limit: you can't move into a battlefield where two other players already have units.
Showdowns and combat
When a unit arrives at a battlefield its controller doesn't control, that battlefield becomes Contested. Two things can happen from there.
If nobody controls it, a Showdown opens: a window where players take turns playing Action and Reaction cards. If only one player still has units there at the end, they take control.
If enemy units are present, you get a Combat, in three steps: Showdown, damage, resolution. Each side sums the Might of its units and assigns that total among the opposing units. Lethal damage has to be assigned to one unit before moving to the next. All of it is then dealt at once.
At resolution, every unit is healed, and attackers still facing defenders who are left standing are recalled to their base. Whichever player still has units there takes control of the battlefield.
Worth noting: a combat never involves more than two players.
Scoring points
There are two moments where you score.
When you take a battlefield (Conquer): you move in, take control, and score 1 point right away.
When you keep it (Hold): if you still control the battlefield at the start of your next turn, you score another point. And another the turn after that, as long as you hold your ground.
A battlefield can only give you one point per turn. If you lose control and retake it in the same turn, that second point doesn't count.
The restriction on your last point
The point that wins you the game doesn't always work like the others:
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By holding, no problem, you win.
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By conquering, you need to have scored on every battlefield in play that turn. If you haven't, you don't get the point and you draw a card instead.
In other words, you can't win by stealing one battlefield at the end. Either you've held your position since the previous turn, or you sweep the whole board in a single turn.
Sources:
https://playriftbound.com/en-us/news/rules-and-releases/gameplay-guide-core-rules/
https://playriftbound.com/en-us/news/rules-and-releases/how-to-play-get-started/
