Playing TFT With Friends: the Two Doors the Game Opens

Three of you agreed on a Teamfight Tactics session, everyone hits play at the same second, and everyone lands in a different lobby with seven strangers. Nobody misclicked. The game does not group friends in its main queues, and that is a design decision rather than a fault. It opens two doors for playing together, exactly two, and both of them are set up before you ever hit the queue button.

Normal and ranked are solo queues, even with friends in the room

This is the part that catches everyone out, including players with hundreds of games behind them. In a standard Teamfight Tactics queue you are an individual entry: the system seats you with seven opponents of similar skill and never once looks at your friends list. There is no party button on the normal or ranked queue.

• Ranked only accepts individual entries. The ladder rewards a personal placement from first to eighth, and a premade group would distort that measurement.
• Normal queue follows exactly the same logic, with the same eight-player format: it is practice for ranked, not a lobby you fill yourself.
• Hyper Roll is no exception either, short format or not. You enter alone there as well.
• Landing in the same lobby as a friend by pure chance is still possible, especially off-peak on a smaller shard, but it cannot be arranged. Every queue is broken down in our tour of the TFT game modes.

The friends list belongs to the Riot account, not to the game

Before any talk of invites, it helps to know where the friends list actually lives. It is not a property of Teamfight Tactics: it is attached to the Riot account, the same one that already carries your progress, your collection and your rank. People are added by Riot ID, the display name followed by a hash and a short tag, such as Name#EUW. Four practical consequences follow, and all four tend to surface at the worst moment.

• The display name on its own is not an address. Without the tag after the hash the search finds nobody, because dozens of players share the same name.
• The request goes one way and has to be accepted the other way. While it is pending, the friend does not show as available and no invite can reach them.
• The list follows the account, never the device. Signing in from a phone, a PC or a Mac changes nothing about who is on it, exactly like the progress described in our article on the Riot account and cross-progression.
• Adding somebody grants them access to nothing: not your purchases, not your rank, not your credentials. What actually protects an account is gathered in our article on Riot account security.

The region wall, always discovered on the night itself

The second thing to settle before any session, and this one cannot be clicked away. Region belongs to the account, not to the machine and not to the country you connect from. An account on EUW and an account on NA never meet, neither in a queue nor in a custom lobby, even when both players are sitting at the same table.

1. 1Check everyone’s region before planning anything else. It is the single fact that decides whether the evening is possible, and it is read on the account rather than in the game settings.
2. 2A friend on another region cannot join your custom lobby. The lobby lives on a server, and that server is the host’s.
3. 3Region transfers exist, but they happen at account level and take everything along. The procedure and its consequences are in our article on changing your TFT region.
4. 4For a scattered group, the simplest fix is for one person to open an account on the shared region. It starts from scratch on the ladder, but a custom game asks for no rank at all.

Double Up: the only queue you enter with somebody else

Here is the first of the two doors, and the one closest to ordinary play. Double Up pits four teams of two against each other: each player keeps their own board, shop and gold, but the two partners share a single health bar and are eliminated together. It is the only mode where the game accepts a group entering the queue as one unit.

• You can enter alone, as a pair or as a group of four. As a pair the team is formed in advance instead of being drawn at random; as a four, the group occupies two of the four teams in the game.
• The invite goes out from the friends list before the queue is confirmed. That gesture is what replaces the party button missing from every other mode.
• The mode keeps its own ladder, won and lost as a team according to where the duo finishes. Playing with a friend therefore leaves your solo ranked tier untouched.
• The mechanics that define the mode, unit, item and gold transfers plus mid-combat reinforcements, are detailed in our article on Double Up.

Custom games: a lobby whose guest list you write yourself

The second door, and the only one that gathers a group larger than two. The host creates a custom lobby and invites whoever they like from the friends list; the format matches a normal game, eight seats around the same board. What the lobby will not do is go and fetch the missing players for you: matchmaking does not fill a private room.

• It is the only setting where you choose all eight participants, so the only one that supports a friends night, an improvised tournament or a coaching session.
• Nothing is at stake: a custom game neither gains nor costs ladder points, which makes it the comfortable place to try a composition you would never risk in ranked.
• Everyone has to be on the same region, since the invite travels through the friends list of the host’s server.
• It is also the best ground for walking somebody through a mechanic for the first time. Our beginner guide reads very well during a game like that, with no ladder pressure attached.

What playing together does not share

One frequent misunderstanding is worth clearing up, because it often decides how a group organises itself. Outside Double Up, playing with friends shares nothing whatsoever: not progress, not the collection, not the rewards.

• Rank stays strictly personal, even after a whole evening spent in the same lobby.
• The pass and its experience advance separately for each player, from their own games.
• Little Legends and arenas belong to the account that owns them. A cosmetic cannot be lent out.
• Double Up alone shares anything mechanical, the health bar and the transfers, and it does so inside the limits of that mode.

Since patch 18.1, the Mac side goes through Android

A reminder that weighs on the planning as soon as part of the group plays on a Mac. Since patch 18.1, the one that opened Set 18 by moving Teamfight Tactics off Riot’s in-house engine and onto Unreal Engine, macOS is no longer supported: no support, no fixes. Riot calls the removal temporary and says it is working to support the system in a future update, without announcing a date. The same patch dropped older Android and iOS devices with the least memory. No account was reset or deleted along the way: progress, rank, purchases and the friends list all stay attached to the Riot account. The full story is in our article on the macOS removal.

Android, on the other hand, is still supported, and it is the official Android client that runs the game on an Apple Silicon Mac inside OSFT Launcher. Nothing changes socially: same Riot account, same friends list, same queues, seen through the mobile version of the game. A friend on PC and you on a Mac can share a custom lobby or a Double Up queue without any trouble, as long as you are on the same region. The machine side is covered in our installation guide.

Worth knowing before you plan the session

• Normal, ranked and Hyper Roll: everyone enters alone, no exceptions.
• Double Up: the only queue that accepts a duo or a group of four formed in advance.
• Custom game: eight seats you fill yourself, with no ladder points at stake.
• Same region for everybody, otherwise neither the friend request nor the lobby works.
• On a Mac the game runs through its Android client since the macOS removal at patch 18.1, and the social side is identical.