Before designing individual components, I broke TFT down into the experiences I wanted the board game to preserve.

• Variance: Players must make decisions with incomplete information and adapt to what becomes available.

• Economy: Every purchase competes with another possible use for gold.

• Synergies: Combining units creates stronger teams and encourages players to pursue different compositions.

• Positioning: Where a unit is placed matters just as much as which unit is selected.

• Commitment & Pivoting: Players need reasons to commit to a plan while remaining capable of changing direction.

The challenge was deciding how to preserve these experiences without recreating every layer of TFT’s complexity.

TFT contains many interconnected systems that work well digitally but become difficult to track manually. Rather than treating every system as essential, I used the board-game format to question what each one contributed.

Individual shops --> Shared draft market

Complex champion abilities --> One simple ability per unit

Many item combinations --> 6–10 predefined items

Attack-speed calculations --> Fast units act before slow units

20+ traits --> 6–8 traits in the starter set

Nine-copy upgrades --> Four-copy upgrade system

Large bench --> Up to 8 units on board and 5 on the bench

PvE rounds --> Removed to focus on PvP

Mana tracking --> Removed to reduce book keeping but added as a Trait

Incremental XP purchases --> Simplified level-up rules

The goal was not to make a smaller version of every TFT system. It was to identify the decisions each system created and find the simplest way to preserve those decisions.

Each champion has:

• Cost

• Health

• Speed

• Traits

• One simple ability

• One move ability

Players collect duplicate champions to upgrade them from one star to two or three stars. The board-game version uses a smaller copy requirement to make upgrades achievable within a shorter session.

The result was a shift toward Trinkets that act as signposts.

They point players toward opportunities without requiring them to follow one path. That also made pivoting more important. If a player couldn't realistically pursue their original goal, the game needed to give them another reason to care about the buttons and Actions available to them.

I began designing around a simple tension:

MOMENTUM

“This is working. How far can I take it?”

PIVOT

“This isn't working anymore. What else can I do?”

The goal wasn't to eliminate variance. It was to make variance something the player could respond to.

One Round of Play

1. Income & Upkeep

• Gain gold, collect interest, and resolve level or upkeep effects.

2. Shared Market

• Reveal a row of champion cards. Players draft from the same market, either taking turns or selecting simultaneously to reduce downtime.

3. Team Building

• Players spend gold, recruit champions, combine duplicates, activate traits, equip items, level up, and rearrange their team.

4. Lock In

• Players secretly or simultaneously commit their boards. Once locked, no further changes can be made.

5. Combat

• Players resolve battles using champion abilities, positioning rules, attack speed, and a limited number of dice rolls.

6. Damage & Cleanup

• The losing player takes 1 damage (with a Health indicated by a 8-sided dice). Clear temporary effects, discard the market, and begin the next round.

One of the most difficult systems to translate was TFT’s experience curve.

Buying experience a little at a time is satisfying because it lets players accelerate their leveling through careful spending. However, tracking experience within each level adds another resource and another layer of bookkeeping to a physical game.

My current direction is:

• Winning a round increases your level by one.

• Losing players may spend gold to level up.

• Losing players can purchase up to two level increases per turn. There is no loss gold streak!

• The maximum level is eight.

This is a major departure from TFT’s normal progression, so it will require significant playtesting. The goal is to preserve the strategic tension between spending for immediate board strength and investing in future team size, while removing the need to track small experience increments.

[Suggested images:

• A comparison of TFT’s traditional XP track versus the simplified board-game progression

• A level tracker from 1 to 8

• Two example turns showing a player choosing between spending gold and leveling up]

This project is currently a systems-design exploration rather than a finished physical game. The next step would be building a playable prototype to test whether the simplified rules preserve the decisions and feelings that make TFT compelling.

The most important questions I would investigate are:

• Does the shared draft create enough competition without causing too much downtime?

• Are players making meaningful choices with their gold?

• Does the 3 × 4 board make positioning matter without slowing combat?

• Do global traits preserve the excitement of building a composition?

• Does simplified leveling create interesting risk and timing decisions?

• How much randomness is needed for combat to feel exciting rather than arbitrary?

• Which removed systems do players actually miss?

• Does the game still feel like TFT when the digital automation is gone?

• A system is not automatically essential just because it exists in the original game.

• Translating a game into a new format requires identifying the experience beneath its mechanics.

• Complexity should be spent on decisions players find meaningful, not on bookkeeping.

• Removing a familiar system can create room for a better physical experience.

• The most important test is not whether the board game reproduces TFT accurately, but whether players still make the kinds of decisions that make TFT compelling.

The next step would be turning these systems into a physical prototype and using playtests to discover which compromises preserve the feeling of TFT and which ones change it too much.