Riftforce Beyond Review

How To Play

There are eight new elements in Riftforce Beyond, bringing the total in the game to 18.

Three or four players play in team mode, either two versus two or two versus one, and a team has a single combined score. In a team game there are six lanes rather than the usual five, three green from the base game and three grey from this expansion. A team player gets three summoners total rather than the usual four.

In a three-player game, the solo player plays twice as often as each team player, so the team gets as many actions as the solo player. There’s a play order card to make this easier to keep track of.

If you’re on a team you can play to any lane, but when you Check and Draw you only evaluate the three lanes in your half of the battlefield.

In solo mode, you’ll choose four elements out of a random six; the “trainer” automated opponent uses four more, but without their special powers. Challenge and plan cards determine what the trainer will do each turn. It’s not as flavourful as against a human opponent, but handling the bot turn doesn’t take much effort, and this is recognisably a cut-down version of the full Riftforce; broadly the same tactics will bring victory.

Components

The components are mostly more cards, with a few more damage tokens. Art is still by Miguel Coimbra, in the same style as the base game.

The box is smaller than original Riftforce, and it will hold all components from Riftforce too, as long as you don’t mind folding the rulebook.

Summary

If you like Riftforce, this is more of the same. Some of these new elements were part of the original design, cut for cost and time; they all feel reasonably balanced against the elements in the original box They do run towards the slightly more complex, but there’s nothing here to confuse someone who’s happy playing the core game. You probably could play with just the expansion, though you’d need to make up two more location cards, the score track, and maybe some more damage tokens.

This certainly isn’t one of those expansions that’s necessary to make the game fun at all, because that box does stand alone, but this definitely does add variety.

As for the new multiplayer game modes, they’re not what the game is about, but they don’t feel like the afterthought that some duelling games’ multiplayer rules are; you can’t just turtle and wait while two other players fight it out, because one of them is your teammate and in any case they’re building up points by attacking each other.

As an occasional solitaire player I appreciate the solo mode too; this isn’t a game I’d normally reach for when playing solo, but if I have the Riftforce itch with no other players about, it’s a good way to scratch it.