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Riftforce
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Description
The Rifts changed our world. Villages were torn apart, Riftforce emerged from it and spread across the land. What seemed lifeless before started to rise and wake. Flames left campfires and waves poured out of their riverbeds. Even the sun and moon leave their footprints in the ground.
We learned how to control those living elementals and formed guilds to perfect this knowledge. While competing for Riftforce the guilds forged temporary alliances to share their unique abilities and guard the access to the Rifts.
Now it is your time! Choose your guilds, combine their powers and rush into battle. Gain Riftforce from the land you control and all the elementals you destroy until you have enough to ascend into a higher state of power.
In Riftforce, the two-player duel card game, each player starts by drafting four of the ten different guilds, each with a unique power, to forge their own asymmetrical alliance. Every game of Riftforce gives you a chance to discover new synergies between guilds which will greatly influence your overall strategy and strengths. Can you combine the flexible and mobile water guild with the all-consuming fire elementals who even harm their allies and unleash their full potential?
The guilds’ elementals are the lifeblood of the game - they are your troops and at the same time the resource necessary to attack. Soon you will find yourself wondering how to use them best. Each turn you are torn, choosing one of three possible actions. Do you want to strengthen your position at the Rift, sacrifice elementals for powerful combo attacks or gather support for your next turn?
Gain Riftforce by destroying the elements of your opponent and by controlling locations along the Rift. Only then will you ascend and win the game.
Discovering new synergies between the different guilds, clever gameplay combos and the deeper layers of strategy will keep you coming back to enjoy the game again and again.
Riftforce! Get ready to brave the Elements….or, rather, the “Elementals”. For this is a battle for control of the Rift, and you are going to need to be nimble with your numbers as well as steady with your nerves!
Set Up
Riftforce is s a 2 player dueling card game so be sure to find a spot where you can sit opposite each other for maximum stare-downs haha!
Essentially, you are battling to destroy your opponent’s cards in order to gain 12 Rift Force (aka points), and you should be claiming victory or vowing to fight again in around 30 minutes.
First set out the 5 Rift cards, placing the score tracker at the far end. I recommend putting the Rift locations in a row between you so that you can each play cards to them in full view of the other player. Once done, you each get a random Guild Summoner and then take it in turns to draft 3 more Summoners representing the 8 remaining Guilds. These are going to be your powers for the game. The unused 2 Guild Summoners are returned to the box.
Once you have your Guilds, you’ll take the Elemental cards to match and shuffle them together. Each Guild contains 4 x #5, 3 x #6, and 2 x #7 Elemental cards. Those relating to the unused Guilds are put back in the box. Then deal yourself 7 cards and place the rest face down next to you to form your deck.
Whoever goes second gets to place one card from the top of their deck to any one of the 5 Rift locations in front of them.
And that’s it. You’re ready to channel your inner Captain Planet and use the elements to power your way to victory!
Riftforce: Card Anatomy
Each Guild of Elementals is asymmetric and can manipulate cards on the Rifts in different ways using their activated powers. For example, in Riftforce, Light allows you to place 2 damage on your enemy’s card at a location and remove a damage from your own Light card or any other ally (i.e. one of your own Elementals). Whereas Thunder means you can place 2 damage tokens on any enemy card at that location (and if you destroy an Elemental as a result, you can repeat the power against another card at the same location).
Earth is the only element with an immediate power. As soon as you lay an Earth card to a location, you can place 1 damage on an enemy’s card at the same location. Then whenever activated, you get to place two damage on your opponent’s first card at that location.
As mentioned above, each Elemental card has a number (#5, #6, or #7) which represents its strength. Throughout the game, your objective is to destroy your opponent’s cards. You do this by placing damage tokens of a greater value on them than their strength value. And your Guild powers will be how you gain and distribute those tokens. If you are successful, you will gain Rift Force and move your token up the score tracker. The destroyed Elemental is removed from the game.
Take A Turn
On your turn, you can do one of 3 actions:
- PLAY up to 3 cards along the Rift (on your side). But they must be the same number or the same Guild. And if you split them between locations, the places must be adjacent; or
- ACTIVATE up to 3 cards which match in number or type (e.g. three 7s or two Shadows). To activate, you must discard a matching card from your hand into your discard pile. So, for example, if you want to activate your 7s, you must have a #7 in your hand to be able to discard. Or, if you want to activate your Plants along the Rift, you must discard a plant from your hand. Once you activate, you will be using those powers to attack your opponent’s cards at those locations; or
- CHECK AND DRAW back up to 7 cards from your discard pile. Checking means looking to see if there are any locations where only you have a card , If you do, then you “control” that location and gain Rift Force. Move your token up the score track.
When a player reaches or gets more than 12 Rift Force points, the game ends and they are declared the Winner!
Very quickly you’ll realise that this game is all about synergies. Combining complimentary Elementals to chain damage causing chaos for your enemy! It’s fast playing and very strategic. Knowing what’s best to do each turn can be tricky – discard a card to activate or set yourself up to check and draw next turn. Keep cards back for when you have a more cohesive hand, or play cards to manipulate control of the Rift locations. There you have it! But hopefully this guide to Riftforce will help ease your way into your first battle for the Rifts!
Two bands of elemental summoners strive for supremacy in a world wrecked by wild magic. Riftforce, a two-player lane battling game by Carlo Bortolini, gives variation from game to game without bringing in full-blown deck construction.
How To Play
First, each player gets a random summoner from the ten included in the game, then they take turns to draft more summoners until they have four each. Each summoner comes with a nine-card elemental deck, and these are shuffled together so that each player has a 36-card deck of which seven make up their starting hand. Five cards form the five lanes of the battlefield. Then turns alternate until someone wins.
On your turn, you do one of three actions:
– Play: choose up to three cards from your hand, all with either the same number (5, 6 or 7) or the same element. These cards can go either all to one lane or one each to adjacent lanes-on your side of the table. A few elements have powers that are triggered when cards are played.
– Activate: discard a card from your hand and activate up to three cards in play (all with a nuimber matching the card you discarded, or all with a matching element) . Each card you activate triggers the power listed on the corresponding summoner card.
– Check and Draw (if you have fewer than 7 cards): you get a point for each lane on which you have cards and the enemy has none. Then draw up to 7 cards.
Each element has a different ability: Fire does three damage to the enemy card in front of it, but also one damage to the ally behind it, so it’s best to use it in a lane on its own. Water does two damage, moves to an adjacent lane, then does one more damage. Crystal does four damage, but gives your opponent an extra point when it’s destroyed. Plant does two damage to an enemy in an adjacent lane, then pulls that enemy in front of it. When a card runs out of damage points, it goes to its owner’s discard pile, and can be drawn and played again.
If a round of Riftforce ends with one player having at least twelve points, and more than the other player, they win.
Components
The summoners, elements, lanes and score track are all normal cards. Damage to elementals is shown by circular tokens (“1” and “3”), and more tokens track your current score.
In my early English/German printing, the summoner cards have English text on one side and German on the other, so shuffling at the start of the game has to be done blindly. I believe this has been changed in later English-only versions.
Art, by Miguel Coimbra (known for Small World, 7 Wonders and Cyclades), is serviceable but adds little to the game; all you need to see on an elemental card is its suit and its number, and all the cards of a given element have the same art (which is thematically tied to the art for that summoner).
This certainly isn’t a “luxury” presentation, which makes the relatively large box surprising-I suspect it’s intended for expansion content.
Summary
Riftforce constructs complex play out of relatively straightforward rules. Stack a Plant and a Shadow of the same number into the same lane, and you can hit an already-damaged enemy, drag it in front of you to empty the lane it was in, and finish it off for an extra point.
Most damaging cards deal damage to enemies in the same lane, so there’s a pressure to stack cards behind each other to try to wipe out the enemy in that location. But you can’t ignore the other lanes, because your opponent is trying to do the same thing; maybe they’ll just leave enough cards there to stop you wiping them all out, and scatter their others elsewhere in the hope of getting easy points.
Most duellers I’ve played, like Magic or Ashes or Sakura Arms, put a heavy emphasis on pre-game deck construction to the extent that it becomes a separate game in itself. In Riftforce that element is mostly absent; if you have element A you can try to pick B to go with it, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll get the ones you wanted. While that may damage the thematic feel of Riftforce, it’s pretty minimal anyway; instead there’s more of a sense of having to make the most of the cards you’ve got for this game, adapting to the summoners you end up with and to each set of cards you draw.
The hardest thing in designing a game like this is ensuring that all the elemental powers are useful against each other, and reasonably balanced. This works; I’ve met some groups that feel that a particular element is too strong or too weak, but there’s no wider consensus of which elements those are.