Riding the Rift – Riftforce Review

There are a lot of two-player lane battler games out there, some with twists and some…without.

The best ones have cards with different abilities that are squaring off against your opponent in an attempt to have the most strength in a lane.

Riftforce meets half that definition, and it’s the good half!

Riftforce is a 2-player card game (though you can play it solo or in team mode with the expansion) published by Capstone Games in 2021.

It was designed by Carlo Bortolini with artwork by Miguel Coimbra.

What adds variety to the game is that each player is going to draft four different guilds which will then give them access to their elementals to play onto the long rift that divides the table.

Players are trying to accumulate Riftforce (wow, that’s the name of the game!) in order to win the game.

Essentially there are five lanes that players are battling over.

However, it’s not a matter of how much strength you have in each lane.

Instead, you are doing one of three actions on your turn.

You can play cards from your hand, activate elementals that are already out, or “check and draw,” which means you gain one Riftforce (point) for each lane (“location”) where you have elementals and your opponent doesn’t.

You can’t do the last action unless you have fewer than 7 cards in your hand.

You also have to make sure that you don’t draw up after playing cards.

You only draw after the Check & Draw action.

Also, when playing elementals, you can either spread them among three different locations, or put them all in the same.

That limitation doesn’t seem like much, but there are times where you want to place two in a location but not three.

But you can’t do that!

That makes the game even more dynamic.

What makes Riftforce a great game is the elemental variety, because in the base game there are ten different guilds to choose from, and you end up drafting from the ones that are dealt out, until each player has four.

You then collect all of the elementals from those guilds, shuffling them into one big deck.

What makes Riftforce different from all of those other lane-battlers, though, is that the strength of the elementals on each location doesn’t determine anything, other than how long each will last.

Instead, you choose the Activate action to activate elementals to attack and do damage to your opponent’s elementals.

You do have some choices when you either play or activate elementals.

Whether you are playing or activating, you can either use three elementals of the same guild, or of the same number.

So in the picture above, you can either activate all three Gem guild cards (the pink ones) or you can activate three of the “5” elementals.

When activating, each guild’s elementals do their own thing, based on their guild.

The “Shadow” (black ones) elementals move to a different location and then do one damage to the first enemy at that new location.

Additionally, if that one damage kills it (each elemental’s health is equal to their number, 5-7), then you get an additional Riftforce in addition to the one you get when you kill an elemental.

The Snow guild, when you activate it, does four damage to the last (i.e. the one at the back) elemental in its lane if it is already damaged.

If it’s not already damaged, it only does one damage.

That’s where the strategy in this game comes from.

You are using the specific guild abilities to do damage to elementals in order to eliminate them and gain Riftforce.

That’s why this game is so fun to play multiple times, because the guild combinations feel almost infinite (they aren’t, but with ten different ones with different combinations, there are a lot).

You can have as many elementals in a location as you wish, and usually (but not always) it’s the first and maybe the last ones that will take damage.

One minor component issue with the base game (very much rectified with the expansion, though) is the number of damage tokens available.

The tokens are double-sided, with 1 damage on one side and 3 damage on the other.

Even with making change, we kept almost running out of them at times.

There clearly aren’t enough to be comfortable, though we never did have to resort to some other marker so I guess they consider that enough.

It was a bit nerve-wracking at times, though.

The strategies in the game are really interesting, because you can’t leave a location uncovered in case your opponent decides to Check & Draw.

That’s an easy one or two Riftforce points for them if you don’t cover.

But then again, if you go where they aren’t, you can do the same!

The game end is triggered when somebody reaches 12 Riftforce.

If the first player triggers it, the second player gets one more turn.

Thus, the game is a bit susceptible to a “runaway leader” issue as there really isn’t a great way to catch up if you fall too far behind.

Sure, you may be able to make up a point here and there if you really concentrate your elemental activations, but your opponent can do the same to keep you down.

Our games have taken 30-45 minutes to play, so it’s not that much of an issue.

You can’t really just play it again if you’re doing it at lunch, but at a game night or whatever, two plays could certainly be done.

Runaway leaders are more of an issue when you’re dedicating an hour or more to the game and not feeling like you can do much is not a great feeling.

In this game, you can try to scrape your way back and you’re not out too much time if you can’t do so.

Riftforce brings new life (ok, it’s from 2021, so not that new) to the lane battler genre, making the health of your cards and the abilities of their guilds more important than just their strength.

Also, the artwork looks gorgeous on the table, with each elemental card looking vibrant, even though there is no difference in the artwork within the guild.

The fact that you have four guilds makes the table presence that much hotter.

The expansion (review for that coming in the future) adds more guilds along with solo and team play, which just makes the game even more vibrant.

If you are into 2-player games, Riftforce is a solid choice for your lunchtime entertainment.

(This review was written after 3 plays with the base game, with 2 additional plays with the expansion)