How to Play League of Legends (LoL) on a Mac

Archive post, October 2011. Skip the instructions below. League of Legends runs on macOS natively now, and it has for years, so playing on a Mac means downloading the Mac installer from Riot and running it like any other app. Nothing here about buying a copy of Windows applies. This went up during a stretch in 2011 when Riot had pulled Mac support, which is why it sends you to a disk partition or a virtual machine instead, and one of those two routes isn't even open any more: Boot Camp only ever ran on Intel Macs, so an Apple Silicon machine has no partition option at all. The file-swapping trick at the top is further gone still. It patches a launcher inside a folder layout the game abandoned when Riot replaced the old client, and the download it points at is dead, on a host that no longer resolves. Read this as a record of what Mac players were doing in 2011, not as a guide.

Use meeee...

Important Changes:

ZigZagJoe found an alternative method to run LoL on your mac without using Bootcamp:

If you replace /Applications/League of Legends.app/Contents/Resources/transgaming/c_drive/rads/projects/lol_launcher/releases/0.0.0.33/deploy/LoLLauncher.exe with LoLLauncher.exe from a windows install, it lets you launch the game and play normally! Doubt it will keep working past the patch, though. 

Here's mine:

http://zzj.itf-inc.com/downloads/LoLLauncher.exe

Use at own risk, blah blah blah. Taken from my desktop windows install, which, interestingly, had 0.0.0.30 as the version rather than .33


Simpler instructions:

1. Find your League of Legends application. 
2. Right click it (or ctrl+click), choose show package contents. 
3. Go to Contents/Resources/transgaming/c_drive/rads/projects/lol_launcher/releases/0.0.0.33/deploy in the finder window that pops up
4. In the folder, Rename or delete LoLLauncher.exe.
5. Download LoLLauncher.exe from the link above, and place it in this folder
6. Run League of Legends application
7. Own noobs.

Still working with riven patch!
Dominion beta working too!

Original Thread: http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=1207942

Looking to play League of Legends on your Macintosh operating system? Unfortunately the Mac client has been discontinued. This means that in order to play League of Legends on your Mac, you'll have to either partition your drive via BootCamp, or run a Virtual PC program such as Parallels to emulate Windows.

Alternative virtual machine softwares includeVirtualBox and VMWare instead, but overall your best bet is Bootcamp.

Note: All of these different methods WILL require you to own a copy of Windows in order to run.

After installing Bootcamp, go to Applications > Utilities > Boot Camp, create a partition for Windows, and then install it via your Windows disk. More information can be found on Apple's Support Site.