Base price: $15.2 players.Play time: 20 – 30 minutes.BGG LinkBuy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)Logged plays: 6

Full disclosure: A review copy of Riftforce was provided by Hobby World and Capstone Games.

I haven’t traditionally played a ton of player vs. player combat-focused games. It doesn’t help that my main buddy for playing games with didn’t like combat games, but since I’ve since moved I suppose I can probably try mixing it up a bit more in the future. We will see. In the meantime, I’ve been working through the wide world of “games I can easily play on Board Game Arena”, so, that broad category has brought us to Riftforce, which is lovely. Let’s see what’s going on!

In Riftforce, well, the rifts opened up, riftforce got everywhere, and it started converting the raw elements into powerful elementals. Various guilds stepped up to wrangle the elements, but naturally, folks saw these powerful rifts and were like, “I want to get me some of that”. As one does. Between you and your opponent, the guilds are split on who to support. So gather your forces and face off to determine who will claim all of that power. Will it be you?

Contents

Player Count Differences

None! This one is locked at two players.

Strategy

Movement can be your friend. You don’t want to necessarily have all your cards stuck in the same place. Having the ability to move cards of your own or, better yet, pull your opponents’ cards out of certain spaces so that you can clear those rifts and score more when you draw cards. Either way, good plan.

High-damage attacks are hard to pull off without either risk or a little bit of setup. Crystals, for instance, hit hard but have the risk that when they’re defeated, your opponent gains +2 Riftforce rather than +1. The ice, on the other hand, needs your opponent to already have some damage on them, otherwise you only deal 1 damage, not ideal.

Flexibility is key so that you don’t get stuck. The game can move a bit slowly if you run out of cards or if you run out of ways to activate your cards. Try to have a few of each number (three, of course, is ideal) and a few of each type in play, and don’t be afraid to draw cards!

Try to draw cards when your opponent has some empty rifts so that you can earn a few more points. If you can get extremely lucky, you can sometimes get 2 or 3 Riftforce from a draw action if your opponent is down a few rifts. Just make sure you don’t leave yourself vulnerable to the same thing!

Protect your more vulnerable elementals, especially ones that give you more points for winning or give your opponent more points if defeated. Crystal 5s are pretty rough. They hit hard, but the wrong full-turn action can wipe them out pretty easily. It’s even worse if they get beaten by a Shadow, because then your opponent gets 1 for beating an enemy, 1 for beating a Crystal, and 1 for winning with a Shadow! That’s 25% of the way to winning the game in one go.

Try to determine how your opponent will approach combat during the draft! You may be able to mess with their plans. There are a lot of great combinations, like Air or Earth and Ice or Plant or Shadow and Crystal, so if you see your opponent getting one piece of the combo, it might be worth trying to take the other piece so that they don’t have as coherent of an offensive force to use against you.

At the end of the day, the best defense might be a good offense. If you have enough power behind your attacks, you can generally push back on most cards your opponent plays. You’re unlikely to win a game without some strategic losses, but that’s life sometimes.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

The art style is fun! It’s very colorful and engaging; I like it a lot!

Drafting various factions is an interesting way to influence your playstyle. I think some players definitely have certain faction preferences (I like Ice, for instance), but even then drafting will force players to think a bit on their feet, especially if you’re playing multiple rounds. Your opponent might very well draft the faction that you used to great effect in the previous game, or it might be unavailable. Either way, worth staying flexible.

It also has a nice bit of expandability, given that you can just add more factions. There’s already at least one expansion I’m aware of; I imagine more could pop in over time if there’s sufficient interest.

I appreciate the simplicity of the game’s core loop. Colors or numbers but never both; that drives basically all of play.

Pulling off cool combos is immensely satisfying. It’s just always great. Combos are the lifeblood of a lot of games, and I always love pulling off amazing ones.

Mehs

It can be a bit annoying to try and remember whether or not each faction affects the front or back enemy. Especially since the actual elementals themselves have no text on them to that effect; you’ll find yourself reading the full text of the cards a lot over your first few plays.

Cons

The variability of your deck can be somewhat frustrating, especially when it blocks you from pulling off combos that you want. You can almost always do something, but sometimes you really just want to have drawn a specific faction card and you instead have to try and make things work with just numbers, which can be frustrating for the player.

Overall: 7.75 / 10

Overall, Riftforce is fun! I’ve been mostly playing it on BGA, and I’ve been enjoying the back-and-forth and figuring out how to experiment with different factions (and figuring out combos between different factions). It’s an elegantly designed game when the modularity clicks, and the modularity clicks for Riftforce. I was intrigued a few years back when I saw it get nominated for the Kennerspiel, and I’m pleased that I’ve been able to dive headfirst into it and see what’s going on. I’ll be interested in seeing how Beyond plays with the formula, given that the core factions already synergize so well together almost regardless of which set you end up with. It does, in part, I think stem from the fact that the faction actions are relatively simple, but it’s still a nice bit of game design that things feel smooth as you play. Unless, of course, you get into the trough where your cards aren’t quite what you need to actually get anything done. That’s less fun, but it does happen. I wish the cards had little icons or something to indicate which enemy they attack (or some way to make it more memorable without going back to the card itself every time), but maybe that’s just a nitpick. Regardless, Riftforce has some nice and compelling back-and-forth play with lots of combat and damage for players who enjoy a little bit of violence in their two-player spaces. If that’s you, you like modular games, or you just wanna be a crystal guy, you’ll probably enjoy Riftforce! I think it’s fun.

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