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How to play Riftbound: a complete beginner guide

· 8 min read · by Daniel

The whole game in one read: the board, the turn, runes, combat and how you actually win. Written for someone who has just opened a deck.

The official Core Rules document is ninety-eight pages. It is precise, and it is the right thing to reach for when a card does something strange mid-game, but it is not how anybody learns a card game. This is the version I wish I had read first.

If you would rather learn by doing it than by reading it, the Trainer teaches the same material on a real board with real cards, and makes you play each idea before it moves on. Everything below is in there, one step at a time.

The point of the game

You are trying to get to 8 points (rule 480.3). You get points by controlling battlefields.

That is the whole game. Everything else, every card, every rune, every fight, exists to move you towards holding battlefields at the moment points are handed out. If you remember nothing else, remember that the cards are not the objective. The ground is.

What is on the table

Six zones matter:

The two battlefields are worth pausing on. Each player brings three battlefield cards in their deck, and at setup one of each player's three is chosen at random (rule 480.5). So you always know one of the two battlefields will be one of yours, but not which one. The other four go back in the box for that game.

Setting up

Each player draws 4 cards (rule 117).

Then the mulligan: you may set aside up to two cards, draw that many replacements, and then shuffle the ones you set aside back in (rules 118.1 to 118.3). Note the order. You draw the new cards before the old ones go back, so you cannot draw the same card you just threw away.

Whoever goes second gets one extra rune on their first Channel Phase (rule 480.7). That is the compensation for not having the first move.

How a turn runs

Every turn runs through the same six phases, in the same order. Four of them are automatic and take no decisions at all.

1. Awaken. Everything you control stands back up. Units that moved last turn, runes you spent, your legend if you used it. All ready again (rule 315.1).

2. Beginning. You score. Every battlefield you currently control gives you a point (rule 315.2.b). This is called a Hold, and it is the quiet way most games are actually won.

3. Channel. You put 2 runes from your rune deck onto the board (rule 315.3.b). This is your entire economy. You do not choose them and you cannot speed it up.

4. Draw. One card (rule 315.4.b).

5. Main. Everything you actually decide happens here. Play cards, move units, fight.

6. Ending. Damage clears off every unit, "this turn" effects expire, and any unspent energy is lost (rule 317.2).

The thing that surprises people coming from other card games is how little the early phases ask of you. Riftbound front-loads the automatic parts so the Main Phase is the only place you think.

Where money comes from

Riftbound has two resources and they come from the same place, in two different ways. A rune on your board can do exactly one of these per turn:

That is rule 163.2, and it is the single most important mechanical fact in the game. A rune pays once, one way. If a card costs 3 Energy and 1 Fury Power, you need four runes: three exhausted, and one Fury rune recycled out of your row entirely.

Recycling costs you the rune. That is a real price, and it is why decks with heavy coloured costs run out of board faster than they expect. Your rune count is not just your ceiling, it is a resource you can spend down.

Any energy you do not spend is gone at the end of the turn. It does not bank.

Getting units onto the board

You play a unit to your base, or a battlefield you already control (rule 355.2.a). You cannot play a unit directly onto contested ground or onto a battlefield the other player holds. Taking ground is done by moving, not by playing.

Units enter exhausted (rule 143.4). They arrive lying on their side, which means they cannot move on the turn they arrive. They wake up in your next Awaken Phase. Some cards get around this with Accelerate, which lets you pay 1 extra Energy and 1 Power to have the unit enter ready (rule 805.1.a).

That one-turn delay shapes the whole pace of the game. Anything you play today is a threat tomorrow, not now.

Moving, and taking ground

Moving a unit costs exhausting it (rule 144.2). The legal moves are:

When your unit arrives at a battlefield the other player holds or is standing on, the battlefield becomes Contested and a showdown opens.

How fights are decided

A showdown is not a duel between two cards. It is one lump of Might against another.

  1. Both sides get a window to play Action and Reaction cards.
  2. Then damage: sum the Might of every attacking unit, sum the Might of every defending unit (rule 460.2). Each side assigns that total among the other side's units.
  3. Damage must be assigned lethal first, with no overkill. You cannot spread 5 damage as 2/1/1/1 across four 3-Might units. You must kill one properly before touching the next (rule 460.2.c.3).
  4. All the damage is dealt at the same time. There is no first strike, so trades are genuinely mutual.

Then the cleanup, and this part catches everybody out: every surviving unit is healed (rule 461.1.a.1), and if any defender is still standing, the surviving attackers are sent back to base (rule 461.1.a.2).

So attacking into a battlefield you cannot clear does not just fail, it costs you the position. Your units go home, exhausted, and you have gained nothing.

Scoring

There are exactly two ways to get a point (rule 464):

You can only score each battlefield once per turn (rule 465).

Control is not permanent. You keep a battlefield only for as long as you have a unit standing on it (rule 187.4.a). Walk away, or let your unit die, and it is uncontrolled again.

The rule that decides close games

This one is not obvious and it wins and loses games. When you are on 7 points and about to take your eighth:

Read that twice. At 7 points, walking a unit onto an empty battlefield does not win you the game. You either need to hold something into your next turn, or take both battlefields in the same turn. Games are lost by people who count to 8 and do not know this rule.

The five things I got wrong first

  1. Treating base as safe. It is safe, and safety scores nothing. Points only come from battlefields.
  2. Attacking without the numbers. Might is summed across all units at the battlefield. Two 2-Might units beat one 3-Might unit. Count before you move.
  3. Forgetting units arrive asleep. The unit you just played cannot help this turn.
  4. Spending runes on Power without meaning to. Recycling removes the rune from your board. Do it twice in a turn and your next turn is poorer.
  5. Not knowing the winning point rule. See above.

Where to go next

Reading this gets you to the point where a game makes sense. Actually playing it is different, and the gap between the two is where most people give up.

The Trainer is free, needs no account, and covers all of the above across 41 lessons and 121 hands-on tests on a real board. It stops you when you get something wrong and tells you which rule you missed, at the moment you miss it, which is the only time that explanation is worth anything.

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