How to Play TFT Mobile (+Tips and Tricks)

The Beginner’s Guide to Teamfight Tactics Mobile

Teamfight Tactics has finally arrived for mobile as the first Riot game you can play on your phone! In this article, we’ll give you a quick rundown of how you can play TFT mobile and share some tips and tricks to help you make the most of playing without a mouse and keyboard.

If you’ve found this article as a brand new player, we strongly recommend checking out our TFT Absolute Beginners guide to help you learn the basic fundamentals of the game.

For newcomers and veterans alike, you can find everything you need on our TFT blog: team comps, champ tier list, and item tier list.

How to Download TFT Mobile

Just like it’s original PC and Mac version, TFT mobile is free! You can currently download it for Android on the Google store or iPhone in the App store.

Interface and Game Modes

Before we get into the gameplay we’ll do a quick run through of the menu. Riot’s keeping things pretty simple in the first launch so the homescreen is quite bare for now.

At the top right of the image below, the icons are as follows:

• Friends list (only let’s you see who’s online, no other functionality at the moment)
• Missions
• Notifications
• Settings (only has audio and general functions like signing out)

On the left, you’ll be able to access rewards related to the Galxies Pass and finally, at the bottom right, you can change your game mode or jump right into the selected game mode by hitting Play.

If you’re a beginner, definitely check out the handy tutorial that’s included – it’s a good way to learn the ropes of the basic gameplay.

Once you hit Play, you’ll enter a lobby where you can invite your friends that are online by pressing one of the + signs.

If you’re wondering, mobile players do crossplay with desktop players.

In the center hub, you can select your aesthetics (Little Legends, arena skins, emotes, and booms).

If you logged in with your usual account, these will be identical to the ones you have the desktop client. Once you have everything equipped you can jump into a game by hitting Start!

In-Game Interface

Riot did a great job designing all of the functions in TFT mobile in a way that’s compatible with small screens.

Since you don’t have the usual hotkeys of a keyboard, there are new buttons and toggles to help you access what you need.

The golden rule here is that if you want more information about something, when in doubt, just tap on it and it will likely expand.

Champions, Items, and Synergies

Some of you out there may already be experts on all the Galaxies champions and items but if you ever need a quick refresher you can just tap on a unit on the board.

Doing so will allow you to see a summary of their stats, synergies, items, and ability.

To go into more detail about their ability or items, just tap on them as you can see in the images above and below that are highlighting Jarvan IV’s Ageless Standard and his Chain Vest.

This also works when you tap on units on your bench, all friendly and enemy champ units on the board, and the champions on your enemy’s bench.

At the top left corner of your phone, you’ll see two icons, a hexagon, and a chest. This is a toggle between your board lineup’s synergies and the items on your bench.

By default, it will show your team’s synergies. By tapping any synergy you’ll be able to see what the synergy does as well as which champions have it.

In the example below, you can see that we have Jarvan IV, Mordekaiser, and Jhin as our three Dark Stars and we’re missing Karma, Lux, and Shaco.

If you ever need a reminder of what champions you should be looking for in your shop and carousel rounds, it’s a good way to check.

By tapping the icon at the top left, it will switch from your synergies to show your unequipped items on your bench.

If you take a look at the image below, you can see a golden “2”. This number represents the number of unequipped items on your bench, in this case we have the Negatron Cloak and the Recurve Bow in the center of the image.

Speaking of the Recurve Bow, here I am demonstrating how to preview which combination two items will create.

Since I am hovering the Bow over the Chain Vest that Jarvan IV already has, I can see that it would make a Titan’s Resolve.

A very important thing that I want to note here is that it will indicate the champion that will receive the item you’re hovering with. At the bottom of the expanded box, you can see Jarvan IV (Chain Vest + Recurve Bow)

This is useful when you have many units and will help prevent you from accidentally equipping an item onto the wrong champ when things get more hectic.

You can also test item combinations by hovering items on your bench as indicated by the image below.

Unfortunately, you still can’t combine items on your item bench so you’ll have to do the trick of combining them on a champion you don’t want and then selling that champ to get the full item (assuming that the champion you want to give the combined item to already has a basic item).

Economy and Experience: How to Buy, Sell, and Roll

Next we’ll help you understand how to find everything you need to manage your economy and experience.

At the bottom right corner of your phone, you’ll see a money bag with your current gold.

Tapping the bag will allow you to open your shop during combat or hide it so you can see your board in between rounds.

Directly above the bag, you’ll find the Refresh button, your roll probabilities for units, and the lock. If you’d like to buy any champ, just tap their portrait. If you want to buy XP, you can find that in the bottom left corner.

If you ever want to sell a unit, just pick them up and you’ll actually be able to drag them to either of the bottom corners to give you more flexibility in a pinch.

If you sell a unit that had items, they will return to your unequipped item section at the top left.

Scouting and Stats

At the top right corner of your phone, you’ll see a swords icon and a players icon.

The players icon allows you to scout any player in the game by tapping on them.

In the image below, you can see that we are scouting theManaTank as indicated by the yellow bar to the right of their name.

To return to your board, you can press the blue icon at the bottom right corner. This blue icon also shows up during carousel rounds so you can return to look at what your team needs.

Toggling to the sword icon allows you to see combat stats. At first tap, you’ll see the damage output of your team.

By clicking the < arrow, you can expand to see the enemy team’s stats.

The damage bars will also indicate the types of damage each unit is dealing. Red represents physical damage while blue represents magic damage.

You can click on any champion’s portrait to see even more detailed stats.

Just hit the > icon to close expanded windows or hit the sword icon to close it entirely and return to player health bars.

The Fun Stuff: How to Emote

This was the moment you were waiting for right?

By hitting the smiley face icon at the top right, you can find your usual emoji sprays as well as your Little Legend expressions to maximze your BM or express sadness when you get unlucky.

Naturally, just hit the X to close the emotes section ASAP.

Tips for Ranked

If you’re serious about climbing, you’ll probably want to play on your computer with a mouse and keyboard to maximize your efficiency and minimize your odds of fat-fingering on your phone.

However, if you don’t have a choice or you’re set on playing ranked on your phone, here are some quick additional recommendations:

• Get comfortable and find an optimal set up for your posture and fingers to increase your precision.
• Play some normal games before jumping into ranked to make navigation second-nature. You don’t want to your split thinking power between figuring out where things are and thinking about game decisions.
• Make sure you have stable Wi-fi to limit your chances of DC’ing. This means you probably don’t want to play ranked while traveling in areas that may have tunnels or other things that may interfere with your connection.
• Lastly, make sure you have a solid amount of battery life. Results will vary depending on your phone but to give you an idea, I played a 30ish minute match on an iPhone XS starting at 72% energy with all my other apps closed. I ended the match at about 50% energy left over.

That’s all for now folks! We hope you enjoyed this article and found it helpful. See you in TFT Galaxies!

You can find everything you need on our TFT site: team comps, champ tier list, and item tier list. Let us know what you think of Teamfight Tactics on mobile in the comments below!

To learn about the latest TFT Set with newly released game mechanics hextech augments, head to our all-in-one Teamfight Tactics Set 6 reveal page that covers all champions, synergies, and more!