Riot Quest is releasing in just a few months, first pre-releasing at Gen Con and then available at your LGS shortly thereafter. We’ve got big plans for Riot Quest that stretch well into 2021 (and we keep adding more!). This includes all sorts of new Heroes to add to your Crew, bigger box expansions that add new ways to play, neoprene maps, etc.

What I want to talk about today is one of those big plans that will be available sooner rather than later, and that’s organized play. The lifeblood of any game is its community, and one of the best ways to support a community is with regular events to get everyone together. Official Organized Play formats provide local event organizers with the tools they need to run these events and also offer some sweet prizes in the process.

All that said, let me tell you about Throwdown.

Throwdown is the main OP format for Riot Quest. When I say “main,” I mean it’s evergreen, always available, the primary toolbox for official events. We’ll have seasonal style events for Riot Quest from time to time, things like quick leagues or single-day special events, but Throwdown is your go-to.

Think Steamroller…but also very different from Steamroller in terms of experience. For starters, Riot Quest is not a competitive game—thus, Throwdown isn’t so much a tournament format as it is an event format. There won’t be clocks, and in most Throwdown events, you won’t even play until a single player remains undefeated. Instead, the core Throwdown system gives you a set of rules to play a few event rounds, score player performance each round, and then hand out prizes based on top performance and to random participants.

Throwdown provides you with options as to the type of event you want to run, and no specific option is treated as the “core” way to play. For example, Riot Quest itself is built to be played 1v1 or as a 3–4 player free-for-all game; thus, Throwdown events can be run as 1v1 or multiplayer FFA events. You can run rounds as a single match to determine the winner or as a best-of-three event to find the victor (most games of Riot Quest take about 20–30 minutes for 1v1).

The biggest feature, in my opinion, will be the option for different types of Crew-building rules that differ from the base game. In a straight-out-of-the-box game of Riot Quest, a player builds a Crew of 5–10 Heroes and gets a hand of Riot Gear cards equal to the number of Heroes in their Crew. Simple enough. No point values, no math required.

Throwdown will introduce unique twists you can choose to use when constructing your event, such as the “Adventuring Party” Crew Construction rule. This option says each player must bring exactly six Heroes in their Crew and must also have one Hero for each of the six classes in the game: Fighter, Gunner, Guard, Scout, Rogue, and Specialist.

You should expect to see Throwdown launch around September, shortly after the game debuts. The launch will include free rules available online and excellent prize kits available for retailers and game clubs to purchase. Speaking of those kits, let me tell you about their contents. Each Throwdown prize kit contains four foil cards (2 Hero cards and 2 Riot Gear cards) and a resculpted miniature that is “blinged out.” The foil cards will typically be split up to hand out to top performing players and to a couple of random participants, while the miniature is awarded to whomever did the best (or got the luckiest) throughout the event, depending on which option you chose to score the event.

The blinged-out model is a representation of the player’s success at getting paid and wreckin’ face: a version of an existing Riot Quest Hero that cannot be purchased separately, only won at events, that shows that Hero laden with tons of loot and gold. We will update the model available in the kit about every six months, as well as which foil cards are available.

For the launch of Throwdown, check out the first prize Hero, Blinged Gubbin:

Make sure to check back at privateerpress.com as we get closer to the launch of both Riot Quest and the Throwdown event format—we’ve got a lot more to show you!