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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.
