What are the zones of the Riftbound play area?

Every card in a game of Riftbound: the League of Legends trading card game is always in one zone or another. The Core Rules divide the play area into zones in rules 106 to 108, and each zone has its own rules: who may look at the cards there, whether their order matters and what happens to a card that arrives or leaves. A zone is a place in the rules, not a box printed on a playmat.

The zones fall into two groups. The board is the part of the table where the game is fought, and every other zone, from the decks to the trash, lies off the board.

Which zones make up the play area?

The play area has eleven kinds of zone. Four of them make up the board.

• Base. Each player has one. It holds your runes, your gear and the units that are not at a battlefield.
• Battlefield Zone. This shared space between the players holds the battlefields.
• Facedown Zone. Each battlefield has one, a spot for a single hidden card.
• Legend Zone. Each player has one, and it holds their Champion Legend for the whole game.

The other seven lie off the board. Each player has their own Main Deck, Rune Deck, hand, Champion Zone, trash and banishment. The seventh is the Chain, which the whole table shares and which exists only while a card or an ability is being played.

What goes in your base?

Your base holds everything you control on the board away from the battlefields. A unit you play enters exhausted, at your base or at a battlefield you already control. Gear is played to your base and enters ready, unless a card says otherwise. Runes you channel come onto the board ready, and they count as part of your base even when you lay them out beside it.

The base is a location, like each battlefield. Your units move between your base and the battlefields, most often by exhausting during your Main Phase, and combat only ever takes place at a battlefield, never in a base.

What sits in the Battlefield Zone?

The Battlefield Zone holds the battlefields, the cards that the players fight over and score their points from. Each battlefield is a location of its own, and any number of units can stand there. A one-on-one Duel has two battlefields in play, one from each player, while Skirmish, War and Magma Chamber have three. Battlefields cannot be killed or moved, so they stay in place unless a card replaces one.

Units are not the only cards that can be at a battlefield.

• Gear with Deploy. Radiance, with its release on 23 October 2026, adds gear with Deploy, which is played straight to a battlefield instead of to the base. Banner of Conquest is one: it gives your units there Assault, and it is killed when an opponent holds that battlefield.
• A facedown card. Each battlefield also has a Facedown Zone, which holds one card hidden with the Hidden keyword, such as Hidden Blade. You may hide a card only at a battlefield you control, and if you lose the battlefield, the hidden card goes to its owner's trash without being played. The battlefield Bandle Tree lets you hide an additional card there. A hidden card can be played from the next turn on without paying its cost, which is what makes it a trap, as the article on Hidden explains.

What are the Legend Zone and the Champion Zone for?

Your Legend goes into the Legend Zone during setup and stays there until the game ends, because the rules let nothing move it or remove it. The Legend Zone is part of the board, so the Legend's abilities work from the first turn. It is not a location, though, so the Legend never moves to a battlefield and never fights.

The Champion Zone holds your chosen champion, the champion unit you set aside from your Main Deck before the game. It is off the board, but you can play the chosen champion from there just as you would from your hand. Once it has left, it cannot go back by normal means.

A few cards change what these two zones hold.

• A second legend. Neeko, Blending In, a Colorless champion unit from Radiance, lets you choose up to three more legends when you build your deck, and when you play her, one of them joins your Legend Zone for as long as she stays on the board.
• A way back for the chosen champion. The battlefield Hallowed Tomb brings it back: when you hold it, you may return your chosen champion from your trash to an empty Champion Zone.
• A way out of the zone. Swift Scout, the Legend of Teemo, can take a Teemo unit from your Champion Zone into your hand.

Which zones are hidden from your opponent?

Only three kinds of card are hidden: the cards in each hand, the facedown cards at the battlefields and the cards in each deck. Everything else is public, from every base and battlefield to every trash, banishment and the Chain, and so is whether a card is exhausted or buffed.

• Your hand is private, so only you may look at it, but the number of cards in it is public. A hand has no maximum size.
• A facedown card is private to the player who controls it. Your opponent can see that a card waits there, but not which card it is.
• Your Main Deck and Rune Deck lie facedown, and their order is secret, so no player may look through them, the owner included, unless a card lets them. The number of cards in your Main Deck is public.

When Scuttle Crab dies, an opponent you choose reveals their hand, and you may look at their facedown cards for the rest of the turn.

Where do cards go when they leave the board?

Most cards that leave play go to their owner's trash: units that are killed, cards that are discarded and spells once they have resolved. A spell never reaches the board at all, since it waits on the Chain while it is played and then moves to the trash. The trash is public and its order does not matter, and some cards can be played from it: spells with Flow, a keyword from Vendetta, such as Dredge Up, can be played from your trash for their Flow cost.

Banishment holds cards that are harder to get back, and a card goes there only when an effect banishes it. A spell with Flow, such as Dredge Up, is banished after it is played from the trash. Time Warp, which gives you an extra turn, banishes itself instead of going to the trash, and Ashe, Focused banishes a card from an opponent's hand until that player holds a battlefield.

A recycled card goes to the bottom of its own deck, a Main Deck card to your Main Deck and a rune to your Rune Deck. When your Main Deck is empty and you have to draw, your trash is recycled into it and an opponent of your choice gains a point, as the article on running out of cards explains.

Three more rules apply whenever a card moves into or out of a zone off the board.

• The card counts as a new card, so its damage, buffs and other temporary changes stay behind. Portal Rescue uses this: it banishes a friendly unit, and the unit's owner plays it again at their base, free of its damage.
• A token that goes to any zone off the board, except the Chain, stops existing at once, so a killed Recruit token never stays in the trash.
• Your cards always go to your own zones off the board. A unit of yours that an opponent controls still goes to your trash when it dies.

How do you lay out the play area on a table?

Any layout that every player can follow works, and the How to Play booklet of Proving Grounds suggests one. The battlefields go between the players, in any order. On each player's side go the Legend and the chosen champion face up, the Main Deck, the Rune Deck apart from it, and open space for the base, the runes and the trash. Leave room for exhausted runes and units, which lie on their side.

Setting up a game fills these zones in a fixed order, from the Legend Zone to the opening hand, and the article on setting up a game lists each step. The Chain is the one zone that has no place on the table, and the article on the Chain shows how players answer what waits on it. The battlefields page and the Legends page list the cards that start the game on the board.