League of Legends is not just a game: it’s a cutthroat competitive digital sport where the winners roar in victory and the losers whimper in defeat. You don’t need to play on the same level as the pros to experience the thrills of these online battlegrounds, however. Blending elements of action role-playing, real-time strategy, and tower defense games into an engrossing amalgam of awesome, League of Legends is a free-to-play game that ensures each play session yields a unique and explosive experience.

Each player in a match controls a single champion. In the default game mode, Summoner’s Rift, two teams of five champions are pitted against each another with the ultimate goal of destroying the opposing team’s nexus, which is guarded by three lanes of towers. The catch is that at the start of a match, your champion is only level 1 with no items to back up his or her quest for victory. To power up to a level sufficient enough to take on the enemy’s base, a champion must first foc…