How to Play
Thirteen short chapters on how
Riftbound is played, from reading a card to closing out a game. Each chapter sets up a position
with real cards and walks you through it a click at a time.
Start at the beginning, or go straight to whatever you are stuck on. Most chapters hold
several positions you can take in any order, and the guide remembers which chapters you have
finished, so you can stop and come back.
Chapters
- 1 The goal of the game You do not win by grinding an opponent down to zero. You win by holding ground, and holding ground means leaving units out where they can be attacked.
- 2 Reading a card The same handful of numbers and symbols sit in the same places on every card. Click any part of one to see what it does.
- 3 What you bring, and how a game starts What you need to bring, the one deckbuilding rule, and the single decision you make before your first turn.
- 4 The board Your cards live in a handful of clearly separated places. Learn the zones and the rest of the rules get much easier.
- 5 Runes: energy and power The mechanic that trips up most new players. You have twelve runes all game and two different ways to spend one. Five payments to work through, in any order.
- 6 A turn, step by step A turn has six phases. The first four are automatic and run before you get to do anything — players remember them as ABCD — then the Main phase, where you actually play, then the Ending phase that clears up after you. Three turns to practise on, each with something different to watch for.
- 7 Moving out and taking ground Playing a unit is only half of it. Points come from getting units out of your base and onto battlefields, and from knowing when to walk them home again.
- 8 When can you play this? Some cards you can only play on your own turn. Some you can play mid-fight. A few you can play at almost any moment — including on your opponent’s turn.
- 9 The chain When you play a spell it does not just happen. It goes on the chain, and the other player gets a say before it resolves. Six worked chains, including the one where “play” means two different things.
- 10 Showdowns Move into a battlefield the opponent is standing on and you get a showdown. That is all of combat. Six of them here, with keywords, the battlefield and the cards in hand all feeding the same total.
- 11 Damage is not might Two numbers that look interchangeable and are not. Getting them straight is the difference between a trade and a clean kill.
- 12 Closing out the game The last point is the hardest one, and the rules make sure of it.
- 13 Putting it all together One position, three turns, and every decision is yours. Both sides have a hand, a rune pool and cards worth holding back; theirs is face down, so all you get is the count. Nothing is random — the draws and their decisions are fixed, so you can replay any line exactly.
About this guide
Written against Riot's official rules documents. It covers a standard two-player constructed game; team play and the corner cases behind individual cards are in the official Core Rules. Card images and text come from the live card pool, so every example uses a real card you can look up in the card library.
The chain chapter follows the HOT FEPR procedure — Handle Outstanding Tasks, then Finalize, Execute, Pass, Resolve — and the two senses of the word “play”. Both are set out in Riot's Unleashed Rules FAQ and Clarifications if you want the primary source.
One rule outranks every chapter here: if a card contradicts the rules, the card wins. And when one card says you can and another says you can't, can't wins. Everything in this guide is the default that cards are written to break.