The new trading card game from Riot based on League of Legends, Riftbound, brings the location-control and heroes from the series to the tabletop.
Riftbound, the new CCG from Riot, is insteresting because it’s set up to play with LoL as its core. The game focuses on champions (commanders) based on different combinations of colors, the idea being to get to eight points. Points are acquired by defeating enemies, capturing or holding locations on the board.
During our off-site play session at PAX East we were set up in a four-person free-for-all format; I’m personally more used to one-on-one games, which this can be played in, but the default is 4-player. Whether or not that just logistically made the most sense for the develoeprs to be able to show it to more people easily, I don’t know, but that was the first thing that struck me. We were eventually told that we can play three people, we can play four free-for-all teams. We can have three-v-one. After going hands-on, it really seems flexible to how people can play.
The game is releasing for the first time, so the decks obviously are not going to be super deep right away like Magic the Gathering. They really are decks designed to get you to understand the gameplay, to utilize your resources to.
To do anything we have to “exhaust” (their version of “tapping” a card) a card, with some actions requiring us to recycle a rune (shuffling it back into our deck) to initiate. That can be calling up a champion or using a spell or doing something with one of our minions.
So we have your main champion, we have their spell effect, we have our hand, then we draw two power or every round. When we have enough power to actually pull a character out of our hand or our main champion, we can put them in the central hub area on our side. We’re then able to use them from our base, take them out, and move them back and forth to the three different lands or the areas that we’re trying to capture. These areas can be very plain or they can have unique effects on them. In our session one granted us the ability to freely retreat a character on it if we are defending, upon another person attacking. Another one gave us a free one power minion creature if we controled it at the resolution of the turn.
The champion obviously determines what colors we can and should be put into our decks. Different champions can have very unique draws and pacing. My Jinx was fast to attack, another of the players was able to create minion after minion, another’s was more balanced, and poor Dali’s Volibear was incredibly powerful but had to wait several turns before he was able to draw out. I think I ended up winning the game by the time Dali even had his seconmd turn on the board with Volibear himself (he used some minions and spells in the process before then).
The game is built around pacing and momentum, with slow and purposeful starts to get everyone level-set and then events, at least in our first session, hitting a climax towards the end with a lot of back and forth.
It’s a really fun experience, from just one hour-long session, and something that I think fans of League and Arkane will enjoy. The card art itself was worth the admission, because it’s just fantastic to look at. One of the reasons that the hands-on was off-site and embargoed is because the art is still in development and the card designs being finalized. Either way, Riftbound has a lot of potential, and something that we’re going to be excited to play more of when it launches (currently set for October-ish).
SideQuesting had a chance to go hands-on with the project at PAX East. This video first appeared on The SideQuest LIVE for May 13, 2025.
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