TFT: Teamfight Tactics Guide for Beginners Part 1, the Basics

1 of 4

League of Legends. Photo Courtesy of Riot Games. /

If you’re brand new to TFT, either because you want to jump in for Set 3 or with it’s coming mobile release, here is everything you need to know about playing the game!

With Teamfight Tactics (aka “TFT”) Set 3 dropping and TFT Mobile soon to follow, it felt like time to sink into a project I’ve been putting off for quite a while. Today, I will begin my first (of who knows how many) guide for Teamfight Tactics. This guide assumes that you are a complete novice to the game and the auto-battler genre and will (hopefully) teach you the very basics of how to play the game and answer some frequently asked questions.

As to my credentials for making this guide, I am a two-time Platinum player in ranked TFT (meaning I finished in the top 10% of all players in terms of ranking). While I am, by no means, an expert at the game, I do feel I have a solid-enough understanding of the basics to at least provide a solid basis for new players to understand the game. So, let’s start with a question that most of you still don’t know the answer to:

What is TFT?

Teamfight Tactics is an auto-battler, which essentially means that you do not control the characters in the game, but simply choose the ones you want to put into play (making up your “army”) and then let them battle. Think of it like a game of chess or, more accurately, the Harry Potter version of chess where the pieces fight each other.

More from Blog of Legends

The game takes place in various stages and rounds (typically seven rounds of battle per stage). TFT players will typically talk about points in the game like 2-4, indicating they are in the second stage and fourth round.

Before each round of play, you will select various pieces called “champions” that are your chess pieces. Once the round starts, the champions that you put onto the board will attack the enemy army, either another player’s army or PC units, depending on which round of the game it is.

If your army defeats the enemy army by killing all of their units, you win the round. If your army dies, your avatar will take damage to their life bar.

Every player starts the game with 100 health in their life bar. If your life bar reaches 0, you are out of the game. The winner of a game of Teamfight Tactics is the last player standing after all others have had their life bars depleted.

So, in a nutshell, TFT is a game where your goal is to assemble the best army possible to put on the board and win enough games to knock out all of your opponents. Each game will have seven other players, all with the same goal, so you’ll have to use your wits and get some good luck in order to beat them!

Home/Gameplay Guides