What Is Teamfight Tactics? How to Play TFT, Explained for Beginners

TL;DR: Teamfight Tactics (TFT) is a free auto-battler from Riot Games. Eight players each build a team of champions from a shared shop, and those teams fight automatically each round. You do not control units in combat; you win by making better decisions between fights (buying, leveling, positioning, and managing gold) until you are the last player standing.

What is Teamfight Tactics?

Teamfight Tactics is a free auto-battler made by Riot Games, the studio behind League of Legends. Eight players compete in the same lobby. Each turn you spend gold to buy champions from a shop, arrange them on a small hex board, and then watch your team fight another player’s team automatically. You are the manager, not the pilot: you never click to attack or cast in combat. Whoever builds the smartest team over the course of the game wins.

On PC you start TFT from the League of Legends client for now. Riot’s support FAQ, as read on October 11, 2026, says a dedicated TFT PC client should launch on November 3, 2026, and Riot said on September 29 that it had moved the client launch from patch 18.4 to patch 18.6; when is the new TFT client coming out tracks it.

What kind of game is it?

A few defining traits set TFT apart from other strategy games:

Trait	What it means
Auto-battler	Combat resolves on its own. Your job is drafting and setup, not micro.
8 players, 1 lobby	You are competing against everyone at once, not in a 1v1.
Shared pool	Everyone draws from the same finite supply of champions, so contests matter.
Round-based	The game is a series of turns, each with a shopping phase and a fight.
Free to play	No paid advantage. Purchases are cosmetic only.

The shared pool is the piece beginners miss most. There are only so many copies of each champion in the game. If three players all want the same unit, they compete for a limited number of copies, which is why “being contested” is a real strategic concern rather than a coincidence.

How a round works

Every round follows the same rhythm. Once you internalize it, the game stops feeling chaotic.

1. Planning phase. You get gold and a shop of five champions. You buy units, combine copies, rearrange your board, and decide whether to spend on leveling or rerolling the shop.
2. Combat phase. Your board fights an opponent’s board automatically. Units walk, attack, and cast abilities on their own.
3. Result. If you win, the enemy loses health. If you lose, you take damage based on how many enemy units survived.
4. Repeat. Do this until only one player has health remaining. In ranked that took 37.6 minutes at the median across 110,328 Set 18 games played from August 25 to October 4, 2026; how long is a TFT game has the full spread and the round counts.

Between combat rounds there are also shared draft rounds (called carousels) where all players walk onto a rotating wheel and grab a champion holding an item, and neutral rounds where you fight monsters for gold and item drops.

Gold, interest, and leveling (the economy)

Gold is the heart of TFT. You use it to buy champions, refresh your shop, and buy experience to raise your level. There are four ways to earn it:

Source	How it works
Base income	A steady amount of gold each round (5 from Stage 2 onward)
Interest	1 bonus gold for every 10 you have banked, up to 5 extra per round
Winning rounds	Extra gold for winning a combat
Streaks	Bonus gold for stringing together wins or losses in a row

Your level controls two things: how many champions you can place on the board, and the odds of finding higher-cost champions in your shop. Higher levels unlock stronger units but cost gold to reach. Balancing “spend gold to get stronger now” against “save gold to get stronger later” is the central tension of the entire game.

Interest feels like the safe play, but it stops at 5 gold a round, and a bank you never spend leaves a weak board that loses health every round. We break that down in the TFT economy guide, and the timing of when to spend on levels is covered in the leveling guide.

Champions, traits, and star levels

Each champion has a cost (1 to 5 gold) and a set of traits (also called synergies or origins and classes). When you field enough champions sharing a trait, that trait activates a bonus for your team. Building around traits is how you turn eight individual units into a coherent team.

Champions also get stronger when you collect copies. Combine three identical 1-star champions and they merge into one 2-star champion that is much stronger. Combine three 2-stars (nine copies total) and you get a 3-star, which is usually the cap. We explain that math and when chasing 3-stars is worth it in our star levels guide.

How do you win?

The win condition is simple: be the last player with health remaining. You start with 100 health. Every time you lose a combat round, you lose health. When you hit zero, you are eliminated and locked into a placement (8th if you go out first, 1st if you outlast everyone).

Because only one player wins, but the top four placements are all considered a “good” result in ranked, most of the skill in TFT is about consistently finishing in the top half rather than gambling everything on first place. A steady stream of top fours climbs faster than the occasional win sandwiched between eighth-place finishes.

What should a beginner focus on first?

You do not need to memorize every champion to start winning. Focus on this order:

1. Learn the round rhythm so the shop stops feeling like noise.
2. Play your strongest board every round. A slightly wrong team that is upgraded beats a perfect team that is not.
3. Respect your economy. Do not roll your gold to zero on turn one.
4. Pick a comp and commit. Follow a known team composition rather than buying random units.

For step 4, start from a list of known teams: the comps page lists Set 18 teams to build toward.

Related guides

• TFT fundamentals: econ, health, leveling, rolling and team building.
• How to learn TFT fast: a repeatable way to learn any set.
• TFT star levels explained: the copy math behind 2-stars and 3-stars.
• How long is a TFT game: the full spread over 110,328 ranked games.
• What TFT set are we on: the live set and patch today.