Some of the best games ever made aren’t built around some revolutionary new mechanic nobody has ever seen before. More often than not, new games are the result of taking a couple of familiar ideas, smashing them together, and discovering something that feels new. The fact is, most games aren’t trying to reinvent board game design; they just want to be something fun to play.
Maybe it’s Gin Rummy mixed with railroad building. Maybe it’s worker placement with dice. Or, as is the case with Got Five!, maybe it’s abstract logic combined with good old-fashioned deduction.
If you’ve ever played classics like Mastermind or even a game like Clue, you’ll immediately recognize the basic concept here. You’re given a set of information, in this case, hidden number tiles that everyone else can see, but you can’t. Your job is to figure out exactly what those numbers are using nothing but logic, deduction, and the information sitting right there in front of you.
I’m sure I’m showing my age here, but if you’re a Gen-X’er, you probably played Mastermind, it’s one of the granddaddies of deduction games right along with Clue!
Simple enough, but there is one small wrinkle in Got Five!. Everyone else is doing exactly the same thing, they have their own set of hidden tiles to figure out. The game is a race to see who gets it done first.
With a 15-minute playtime for up to 4 players, Got Five! nails that filler sweet spot, and because the rules are simple to learn and the game is colorful and bright, it’s perfect for family board game night, a no-brainer really.
The question I think I want to answer in this review is wether or not Got Five! has the chops to be a little more, a good filler for the board game geeks out there like me who are looking for an excuse to buy another shelf to put more games on.
Let’s find out!
Overview
Final Score: (4.50 out of 5) Awesome Game!
I think the most interesting thing about Got Five!, once you’ve got a few back-to-back games under your belt, is the realization that deduction and logic aren’t actually the only things going on here.
Something happens around your third or fourth game.
You realize that if you’re going to sit there and wait until you’re 100% certain about every number hidden in front of you, you’ve probably already lost.
Because the winner of Got Five! isn’t necessarily going to be the player who solves their puzzle with absolute mathematical certainty. It’s going to be the player who recognizes when they know enough, looks at the odds and pace of the game, takes a calculated risk, and goes for it.
You don’t have the luxury of sitting there like some pipe-smoking professor of mathematics, spending ten minutes constructing a flawless proof that the blue tile in front of you must be a seven. While you’re doing that, Susan across the table has made two educated guesses, solved her hand and is already looking at you like you’re an idiot.
You have to think on your feet.
When playing Got Five! for the first time, you’re going to have this feeling that you have to be 100% certain about your tiles before you guess. What you quickly realize is that you will never win a game by doing that. Some guesswork becomes mandatory.
You’re eliminating possibilities, making assumptions, watching what everyone else is doing and constantly deciding whether you have enough information to make your move. There’s logic here, certainly, but there’s also intuition, probability and just enough gambling to keep the whole thing from feeling like homework.
Abstract deduction games are difficult to describe because explaining their mechanics inevitably makes them sound far more academic than they actually feel at the table. Got Five! has some of that academic feel to it but in practice, Got Five! has the energy of a party game.
Turns move quickly. Everyone is paying attention. You’re racing against each other, second-guessing yourself and occasionally taking a shot before you’re entirely certain you’ve got the answer. Then somebody suddenly announces that they’ve figured out their tiles and everyone else groans because they were one bloody turn away.
That’s Got Five!.
It’s clever without being exhausting, competitive without being particularly mean and thinky without demanding that everyone at the table be a hardened strategy gamer.
And that’s perhaps its greatest strength.
I can see this working with almost anyone, from relatively casual players looking for a quick 15-minute game to heavy gaming nerds like myself who normally consider a rulebook under 30 pages suspiciously lightweight.
Got Five! is just a lot of fun to play, and so far, everywhere I have tried, it would take 3-4 rounds before anyone was willing to move on to the next game. A very strong sign that this one is a keeper.
Components
Score: Tilt:
Pros: Bright, colorful, and sturdy; feels wonderful to handle, everything is perfectly tuned.
Cons: It has the look of a kids game, some might pass on it for that reason.
Components
Got Five! is a fantastic little production, especially considering that we’re talking about a 15-minute filler game here.
The tiles are chunky, colorful and feel great in the hand. The artwork is bright and clean, the numbers are immediately readable, and everything has been designed with the rather important idea that you should be able to glance across the table and instantly understand what you’re looking at.
I love it when a game has exactly what you need to play it, not a single token too much or not enough, a perfect, streamlined design that wastes nothing. I love it!
The game also comes with erasable whiteboard pens and boards for tracking your deductions, which might sound like a small thing, but it’s a fantastic addition. They feel good to use, keep everything organized and, perhaps most importantly, help keep the game moving at the brisk pace it was clearly designed for.
Even the rulebook gets it right. It’s clear, concise and doesn’t waste your time trying to turn a simple game into a 30-page technical manual. You can crack open the box for the first time, learn the rules, teach everyone else, and have your first game finished in under half an hour without anyone sitting there wondering what the hell they’re supposed to be doing.
There isn’t anything particularly extravagant here, nor does there need to be. Got Five! simply understands exactly what kind of game it is and gives you everything you need to play it in the best possible form.
It’s pitch-perfect execution.
Theme
Score: Tilt:
Pros: A party-game-like atmosphere that creates a great table presence.
Cons: The game really doesn’t have a theme unless putting funny faces on tiles is a theme.
Got Five! doesn’t really have a theme. It’s very simply an abstract deduction game, but it does have this wonderfully friendly and colorful presentation that is going to get the attention of kids scanning your game shelf. Which is great, because while I think Got Five! works with pretty much any sort of gaming group, I think it’s particularly strong with kids.
More importantly, it has that perfect balance of rules, strategy, and fun where everything feels like it has been thoroughly tested, adjusted, and stripped down until the designers arrived at the ideal version of the game.
The game doesn’t really have a theme, but it has personality.
You can almost reverse-engineer the design process just by playing it.
If Got Five! used six numbers instead of five, it would essentially be the same game, except slightly longer, and I think it would start overstaying its welcome. With four numbers, it would probably be over too quickly. If you had to identify the colors as well as the numbers, suddenly you’ve added a layer of complexity the game doesn’t need. If you only had one type of action instead of the two, sorting and category questions, the deduction would become too straightforward, and the whole thing would lose much of what makes it interesting.
Everything feels like it’s sitting exactly where it should be.
I obviously wasn’t there during development, but Got Five! feels like a game that went through a hell of a lot of testing. I can easily imagine versions with more numbers, fewer numbers, additional rules and different ways of asking questions, with each unnecessary piece slowly shaved away until only the good stuff remained.
The result is a game that might technically be themeless, but still has a very clear identity. It’s bright, friendly, fast and immediately approachable, with that easygoing party-game energy that makes you want to pull it off the shelf and say, “Alright, one more.”
And because a game takes about fifteen minutes, one more usually turns into three.
Gameplay
Score: Tilt:
Pros: A perfectly tuned game that knows its design goal and achieves it with perfection.
Cons: If you don’t like deduction games, you will only like this game instead of loving it.
In Got Five! you have a single objective: be the first player to figure out what the five tiles sitting in front of you are.
The problem, of course, is that you can’t see them.
The only information you have to work with is the tiles revealed during the game and the information you can squeeze out of the other players.
Each round, a player does two things. First, they reveal a tile. Then they get to ask one of two types of questions.
You can compare the dots on a revealed tile to one of your hidden tiles. Every tile has either one, two, or three dots on it, and the other players simply tell you whether or not they match. Alternatively, you can ask the other players to place a revealed tile into the correct numerical position among the five hidden tiles sitting in front of you.
That’s basically the game.
From those tiny scraps of information, you have to figure out exactly what five tiles you have through deduction and process of elimination. At any point, even during someone else’s turn, you can shout “Got Five!” and attempt to solve your puzzle. Get all five right and you win. Get even one wrong and you’re out of the game.
To help you along, each player has a board hidden from everyone else and an erasable marker for taking notes. The board shows all the possible tiles in the game, including their colors, dots, and values. As information comes in, you start crossing off possibilities until eventually the answer begins to emerge.
The clever bit is that you’re rarely eliminating possibilities one at a time.
For example, a sorting question might suddenly tell you that the blue, red and orange tiles in front of you are all higher than 40. Bang. Every possible tile below 40 is eliminated from those positions.
Then you notice there are only four unrevealed red tiles left. You know three of them have two dots and one has a single dot. Another player reveals a blue tile, asks whether its two dots match one of their hidden red tiles, and gets a positive answer. That little piece of information might suddenly allow you to eliminate with a fair amount of certainty several more possibilities and identify your own red tile.
That moment, when you solve it, and you realize you’re the only one, is very satisfying; you feel very superior and rightfully so!
Now you know your red tile is 21.
But that doesn’t just tell you the red tile.
If the orange tile was previously sorted to the right of it, you now know the orange tile must be higher than 21. Suddenly another chunk of possibilities disappears from your board.
One answer leads to another deduction, which leads to another, and occasionally a seemingly insignificant piece of information causes half your board to collapse.
I know that sounds slightly confusing when I’m trying to describe it in a blog post. It’s considerably easier to understand when you’re actually sitting at the table. The important point is that information in Got Five! compounds. A single reveal or answer can eliminate a surprising number of possibilities if you’re paying attention and applying a bit of logic.
In our games, we saw players solve their entire puzzle in as few as five or six turns.
And this is where Got Five! becomes wonderfully tense.
I love a good deduction game, even the classics like Clue, but with Got Five! you get that satisfaction in a much shorter game and considerably less rules explanation.
There isn’t a timer. Nobody is counting down. Yet the entire game develops this pressure-cooker atmosphere because every time a tile is revealed or a question gets answered, you know that might be the piece of information somebody else needs.
You might be sitting there thinking, I’m almost certain I’ve got this.
Then someone else shouts “Got Five!”
Dammit!
That’s the trap. You don’t really have the luxury of waiting until you’re 100% certain. Eventually you have to decide whether the information you have is good enough and take the shot, because somebody else is probably reaching exactly the same conclusion about their own puzzle.
The rules are incredibly simple, but what emerges from them is fast, competitive, and surprisingly exciting. Got Five! creates that wonderful little dopamine hit when a pile of apparently disconnected information suddenly clicks into place, and you realize you know the answer.
And then you want to do it again.
I can pretty much guarantee that Got Five! isn’t going to be played once and put back in the box. You’re going to play it again and again.
Because once you’ve solved your five faster than everyone else, it feels amazing and if someone beats you to it, that unsatisfying, can’t let it go sensation will drive you nuts.
Replayability and Longevity
Score: Tilt:
Pros: Addictive; you’re going to want to play this over and over again.
Cons: I’m sure there is a limit somewhere; I would imagine eventually you will tire of it.
I’m going to make this one short and sweet.
From the first time I put Got Five! on the table, everyone I introduced it to was immediately hooked. There was simply no such thing as playing one game, and since then it has been played over and over again in my house.
It has very quickly become one of those standard “Let’s do a quick one” games, which I think is about the highest compliment you can give a filler.
There aren’t piles of different modes, variable setups, or mountains of content here. It doesn’t need any of that. The replayability comes from the fact that the puzzle is different every time, solving it feels great and, win or lose, fifteen minutes later you’re ready to have another crack at it.
That’s really all there is to say.
Got Five! has the chops. The 15-minute playtime makes it incredibly easy to get to the table, and the game itself makes it difficult to play just once.
It really sticks the landing.
Conclusion
Conclusion
Got Five! is a fast, clever, and ridiculously fun little filler that asks almost nothing from you. Set it up, spend a few minutes explaining the rules, and everyone at the table will be dialed in and, before long, demanding another game.
It pretty much sells itself.
This is an incredibly easy recommendation for me because I’m genuinely struggling to come up with a group that wouldn’t enjoy Got Five! It’s simple enough for kids, clever enough to keep experienced gamers engaged, and short enough that even the most reluctant board gamer isn’t being asked to make some sort of blood oath committing their entire evening to it.
Hell, this is a game even my wife will play, and we’re talking about a person regularly quoted in our house as saying:
“I hate board games.”
She likes Got Five!
Frankly, if Got Five! were on trial for whether or not it belongs in everyone’s collection, that’s the only piece of evidence I’d present.
I don’t know what it’s like for everyone else out there, but in my local gaming group, we don’t really play D&D anymore and its a bit of a bummer. I’m going to vent and contemplate out loud today about the core issues of trying to get D&D to the table, perhaps some can relate.
First, its important to note that It’s not because my group doesn’t like fantasy RPGs. Quite the opposite. It’s because my gaming crew occupies a rather awkward little patch of RPG no-man’s-land: they don’t particularly like modern D&D, but they aren’t especially interested in Old School D&D either.
They’re too young to have nostalgia for the old stuff, but too experienced to be satisfied by modern D&D’s strange, dissociative dissonance.
In short, neither of the two schools of D&D available today to us scratches that itch.
On one side, you have Wizards of the Coast’s latest rendition of the game, 2024 5e, with all of its modern assumptions about balance, character building, and what a D&D adventure is supposed to look like. Essentially a game of levers to pull on, something very system-driven and, if I can use a strange word here, very programmatic. There is a reason why modern D&D translates so well to video games.
The success of Baldur’s Gate 3 can be attributed to a lot of things, but if I were to paraphrase it, it’s because of its quintessential D&Dness. There is no denying how well the 5e mechanics translated into a video game, it was practically made for it.
On the other, you have the OSR, which, despite producing some genuinely fantastic material, often seems determined to solve the problem by digging up rulesets from 80’s and 90’s, changing the saving throws, commissioning some wonderfully grotesque artwork and releasing it again. Most of the OSR really is a rehash of the awkward rules of a mostly fractioned base system. The systems produced by the OSR are getting better and better, but they still rely on nostalgia to pave the way and old rules are still considered sacred cows; it’s rarely based on modern game design.
Deathbringer, the latest and greatest out of the OSR, is no doubt a great rendition and take on old-school D&D using modern mechanics. I have full faith in Professor DM, and I definitely think the OSR is starting to branch further and further away from its archaic legacy systems. It’s really only in the last couple of years though, that this started happening. Most games in the OSR have sort of re-affirmed the legacy stuff, and I don’t think my players have any interest in that sort of thing.
My gaming crew wants neither.
Thankfully, they’re also an adventurous bunch. They’ll try just about any RPG you put in front of them. We don’t suffer from that peculiar condition I’ve encountered in so many gaming groups where everyone agrees that D&D isn’t quite giving them what they want, but nevertheless insists that the solution must obviously be to play more D&D, be it old school or modern.
So we wander. And, for the most part, I’m perfectly happy wandering with them. Except…
I really want to play D&D.
The strange thing is that whenever I say that out loud, I find myself wondering what the hell I actually mean. Because unlike the rest of my crew, I dosuffer from nostalgia, yet I do get their point.
I’ve played pretty much every edition of D&D as it was released, going all the way back to 1st Edition AD&D. Not 0 Edition, mind you. I’m old, but I’m not carbon-dated old.
And because of that, I’ve developed a general affection for the whole ridiculous thing.
I love the settings. I love the lore. I love the mechanics, even the weird ones that require a flowchart, three tables and a brief consultation with Gary Gygax’s ghost. And I have a particular soft spot for that older style of play: dungeon crawls, hex crawls, wilderness survival, resource management, and that wonderful zero-to-hero journey where a character begins their adventuring career armed with a rusty sword, six hit points, and wildly misplaced confidence.
It’s a love affair that has lasted nearly forty years. I’m not ready to give it up.
And it’s not that I have a problem with other systems. My group is currently playing Forbidden Lands, and we’re having a blast. In many ways, that game is a love letter to old-school D&D. It captures the danger, exploration, survival, and unpredictability I love.
Forbidden Lands is one of the unique early cases of the OSR producing something modern and unique without relying on legacy D&D rules, yet firmly hardwired as an old-school-style game. It’s kind of a horror survival game in a fantasy world with a bit of a post-apocalypse feel. It actually reminds me a lot of Dark Sun.
But…It’s not D&D.
And that’s where things get complicated. Because systems do matter.
There’s something buried inside the perpetual motion machine that is Dungeons & Dragons, something that has somehow survived editions, designers, companies, rules revisions, forgotten settings, THAC0, feats, healing surges, advantage, subclasses, and approximately seven billion arguments about alignment.
It still is, something unmistakably unique, something very D&D.
Other games have captured pieces of it. Some have improved upon individual parts of it. There are RPGs with better combat systems, better exploration rules, better character development, better settings, and unquestionably better-organized rulebooks.
And yet none of them quite manage to reproduce the magic of the whole thing.
I suspect that’s part of the unspoken reason D&D remains, in the eyes of so much of the RPG community, the roleplaying game.
There’s some strange alchemy hidden between those pages. A little bit of true sorcery that designers have been trying to bottle for fifty years.
And perhaps that’s the problem. Maybe what I’m looking for isn’t old D&D. Maybe it isn’t modern D&D either.
Maybe what I actually want is the version of D&D that exists somewhere in between the editions, in the accumulated memories, ideas, mechanics, and traditions of forty years spent rolling dice around a table. I really believe that the OSR will be or perhaps already is the answer to my quest, pun intended!
I have my favorites in principle, but not in practice
I recently did a Top 10 list of the best versions of Dungeons & Dragons, and sitting comfortably at number one was 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I still consider it the best version of D&D ever produced, and not by a small margin.
That said, if you put me on the spot and said, “You can run any version of D&D you want. Pick one,” I don’t think I’d actually choose 2nd Edition AD&D.
I love 2nd edition AD&D mainly because I think it captures that D&D Sword and Sorcery feel. It does have quite a few chinks in the armor, especially when compared to modern RPG’s. It’s flawed perfection if there is such a thing.
Contradictory? Maybe. But there is a difference between the version of D&D I admire most and the version I actually want to put in front of my current group.
I love the core concepts of 2nd Edition. I love its style, its atmosphere, its assumptions about what an RPG should be, and the general approach it takes to running a fantasy adventure. But it also does a lot of awkward things mechanically, things I know would draw the ire of my players and, admittedly, irritate me as well.
There are plenty of little problems you can fix. THAC0, for example, can be turned into ascending AC with some very simple math. But the deeper you dig, the more strange little subsystems you find, and not all of them mesh particularly well with the atmosphere I’m trying to create at the table.
That’s the catch with 2nd Edition AD&D.
For me, it may be the best version of D&D, but it’s the best version when everyone sitting at the table already wants to play 2nd Edition AD&D.
Get a group of enthusiastic players who understand its quirks, accept its rough edges, and are excited about what the game is trying to do, and I think you’ve hit the perfect storm. In the hands of that kind of group, AD&D 2nd Edition is almost impossible to beat.
But I don’t have that group.
And trying to push 2nd Edition onto the group I do have wouldn’t magically recreate the D&D experience I’m nostalgic for. More likely, I’d spend half my time explaining, defending, ignoring, or house-ruling the very things they don’t like as I field complaints.
At that point, what exactly am I preserving, the game, or just the name on the cover?
D&D sucks?
Strategically, I know that playing the wrong D&D with my group is probably a bad idea. It’s just not going to go anywhere good and will ultimately reinforce the idea that “D&D sucks”, a common phrase uttered in my gaming circles. Worse yet, a failed attempt might spoil the potential of the many D&D-like games out there that reinvent its architecture in more modern and interesting ways, some of which I might actually have a chance of getting to the table.
In fact, I have dedicated a considerable amount of time over the last few years trying to find, even create, that perfect D&D variant that might actually work for my gaming crew. Past attempts have had mixed, mostly bad results, but seeing everyone genuinely enjoying Forbidden Lands, a very distant cousin to D&D, but a cousin nonetheless, has given me some new hope.
I think the trick to succeeding is first understanding what my players actually mean when they say “D&D sucks.” Perhaps not just my players but all players out there, as this reflex accusation levied at D&D is quite common no matter where you look.
After all, D&D isn’t one game. It’s not even one system. Hell, I’m not convinced it’s even one style or theme. That is both the problem and, potentially, the thing that gives me some hope.
In a strange way, I think my players actually do like D&D. They just like D&D as a concept more than they like any of the specific versions of it they have actually played.
I know, for example, that they don’t like Bonus Actions, Healing Surges, THAC0 or percentile dice rolling. They don’t want tactical combat or slow gameplay progression. They are very story-focused and generally prefer quick, sensible resolutions and abstractions over gamified lever pulling. None of this is theoretical either. These are conclusions I have drawn from games we have actually played together.
There is something else worth considering here, however, and that is execution.
One thing I have noticed about my gaming group is that even a weak system can work if the story is good and the atmosphere at the table is right. A game can mechanically be completely not our bag of chips, and we can still have a great time with it, there can still be a considerable buy-in from everyone.
Our experience with Pathfinder 2nd Edition is probably the best example.
My group played Pathfinder 2nd Edition for a pretty extended period; we bought all the books, we did a full mental buy-in, and it was fun. In hindsight, though, I don’t think the system had anything to do at all with what we enjoyed about the campaign. In fact, I would argue it was despite the system, not because of it, that the campaign was successful. We liked our characters, the story, the world. The system itself was a constant nuisance.
For all its praise as a competitor to D&D, I think Pathfinder 2nd Edition is a wildly overcooked system. It takes the “rules of the game” concept so literally that at times it feels like it has attempted to codify the entire concept of roleplaying.
We appreciated it as a rules system in the sense that we could admire the complexity and intricacy of the design, but as a practical system at the table it constantly interfered with the thing we were actually there to do.
Roleplay.
I mean, the only thing in Pathfinder 2nd Edition you don’t roll for is talking, and that’s only true some of the time.
Yet we had a great story, great characters and some amazing GMing, which produced a genuinely fun campaign despite the system being rather exhausting.
I remember leveling up in particular being one of the biggest chores. Pathfinder 2nd Edition may be the first and only RPG I have ever played where gaining a level felt more like a punishment than a reward.
Part of the problem was that the game scales so aggressively alongside the characters. Your bonuses go up, but so do the DCs, monsters and obstacles you are expected to face. The numbers get bigger, your character sheet gets more complicated and you gain more mechanical levers to pull, but in actual play it often felt like I was running just to stay in the same place.
At 1st level I might need a 15 on the die to accomplish the sort of difficult task appropriate for a 1st level character. Many levels later, after adding an impressive pile of numbers to my character sheet, I might still need roughly that same 15 to accomplish the sort of difficult task the game now considers appropriate for me.
Obviously there is considerably more mechanical nuance to Pathfinder 2nd Edition than that, but from the player’s side of the screen that was often what progression felt like.
More numbers. More abilities. More rules. More things to remember.
Not necessarily more capable, and nothing that was added improved the experience in any meaningful way, quite to the contrary, all the rules kind of spoiled the fun.
The point of this little Pathfinder detour is that I already know one important thing about whatever version of D&D I eventually put in front of this group.
It needs to get out of the way, it needs to be consumable and approachable; in a sense, it needs to be simple.
It needs quick resolutions, sensible abstractions and enough empty space for us to roleplay without constantly consulting the machinery of the game.
Because that is where my group lives. You could say we are closer to the theatre kids version of D&D than we are to the kick down the doors and murder everything that moves sort of players.
Picking The Right D&D Variant
Now I know what defenders of X or Y edition are going to say.
Don’t use mechanics to replace roleplaying. Just wing it. Change this rule. Ignore that rule. Adapt the game to your playstyle. The rules are just guidelines. Etc… etc…
The internet is full of this kind of advice, but at the end of the day the reality at the table is that whatever a system does mechanically is generally how people are going to use it mechanically.
If there is an Insight skill, people are going to use the Insight skill.
It’s just how it is.
You see the issue between role-playing, story, and player-DM desires for outcome and what a system produces when watching Critical Role. It’s so crystal clear to me that D&D 5e is the absolutetly wrong mechanic for this group, the game itself is constantly getting under their feet. It also shows, however, that a good gaming group can make any system work. I honestly believe that if this gaming group wasn’t famous running a show on YouTube and they were just playing together for fun at home, they would have abandoned D&D 5e a long time ago.
Of course, as the GM I can change rules, ignore mechanics, make rulings on the fly and generally beat the system into whatever shape I want. I’ve been running RPGs long enough to know how to do that.
But that isn’t what I want.
I want to be able to hand my players a rule system and let them use it. I want them to engage with the mechanics without those mechanics derailing either their vision or mine for the campaign, the story and, most importantly, the space they need to roleplay.
When I wrote my Top 10 Versions of Dungeons & Dragons article, one of the goals beyond simply coming up with the list was to dissect the different variants in the hope of finding one I might actually be able to put in front of my players.
Going back through that list with everything I know about my group, the process of elimination produces a surprisingly clear result.
We are currently playing Forbidden Lands, number 10 on my list, and despite its low ranking, it was a serious contender. The fact that one of my buddies independently picked it up and is currently running a campaign with it, which everyone is enjoying, suggests that I must be onto something.
Forbidden Lands gets a lot right for this group. Unfortunately, as I already pointed out, it isn’t D&D. It’s not even particularly close mechanically. It’s more like a distant cousin that occasionally shows up at the family reunion wearing a suit of armor. I love playing it, but it’s not the one I want to run.
Pathfinder 2nd Edition, number 9, has already been tried and executed for crimes against free time. It’s simply too heavy and too mechanically involved for what my group wants out of an RPG.
Castles & Crusades, number 8, has considerably more potential. In fact, this might be my second attempt if the first one doesn’t work out. It’s core sword and sorcery, relatively clean and, to me, feels a bit like an alternate history version of 3rd Edition D&D. The version we might have gotten if Gygax had remained at the helm, made his peace with some modernization, and didn’t insist on maintaining backwards compatibility with 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D.
Modern 5e, number 7, is certainly more direct than Pathfinder 2nd Edition, but for my purposes it suffers from much the same problem. Too much rules weight. Too many mechanics. Too many levers. The same basic criticism applies to 3rd Edition and Pathfinder 1st Edition at number 6.
Dungeon Crawl Classics, number 5, is an interesting one because we actually tried it.
Unfortunately, we played it online during the pandemic.
It went fine. We had fun with it. Nobody hated it, but nobody exactly fell in love with it either. Its reception was mostly just… meh.
In fairness to Dungeon Crawl Classics, I suspect that had as much to do with our general dislike of playing RPGs online as it did with the system itself. I actually think DCC is a really fun game and, on paper at least, it fits much of what I’m looking for here.
Unfortunately, those memories muddy the waters a bit. If I’m trying to sell my group on D&D again, starting with “remember that game we played online that none of us were particularly excited about” isn’t exactly putting my best foot forward.
So DCC is out.
I think Dungeon Crawl Classics is a great system overall, but it does use these rather wierd and oddly shaped dice, an aspect of the game that really serves no logical purpose. It’s just wierd for wierdness sake, it doesn’t do anything at all to make the game better.
AD&D 1st Edition at number 4 and AD&D 2nd Edition at number 1 both run into the same problem.
Legacy.
My group is simply the wrong generation for nostalgia to smooth over the rough edges. When I look at some strange subsystem in AD&D, I see history, charm and a particular philosophy about how D&D should work.
They just see a strange subsystem.
Their nostalgia lives elsewhere. 3rd Edition D&D and the Swedish classic Drakar och Demoner, known today in English-speaking markets as Dragonbane, are much closer to the games of their youth. Even those games, however, hold little interest for them as something to revisit today. They are not nostalgia gamers, to put it plainly.
Which brings me to B/X and BECMI at number 3.
I think these games come considerably closer. They are simpler than AD&D, cleaner in many places, and represent what I consider to be some of the best versions of classic D&D ever produced. There is a reason so much of the OSR traces its DNA back to Basic and Expert D&D.
But I think they would ultimately suffer the same fate.
Descending Armor Class, race as class, and all the other little artifacts of early D&D design would immediately identify the game as old to my players. I could convert things, house-rule things, and modernize things, but once again I’m back to trying to convince my players to look past the system rather than simply giving them a system they actually want to use.
And that defeats the entire purpose of this exercise.
So after eliminating the games that are too complicated, too modern, too old, too nostalgic, not nostalgic enough, already tried, mechanically unsuitable or simply not actually D&D, I am left with one game from my list.
Number 2. Dolmenwood.
Choosing Dolmenwood from the list I agonized over for the Top 10 Versions of Dungeons and Dragons was not the first thing I did to come to that conclusion. I have actually spent about 3-4 years painstakingly creating my own version of D&D for this very purpose. It was the release of Old School Essentials and games like Dolmenwood that really caused me to abandon those projects. I came to the realization that there are much better designers and writers out there, it was a much easier process to choose one of those systems.
And the more I look at it, the more I think Dolmenwood might be the version of D&D my group doesn’t know they want.
Dolmenwood – The Great Hope
There are actually five unique things about Dolmenwood that I think will register with my group and, perhaps, might do the same for a lot of modern gamers.
A Setting-Driven Game
While Dolmenwood is a D&D variant, a sort of modernized version of what 1st Edition D&D might look like if you designed it today, one of the key elements of that design is that it’s made for a specific setting.
I believe, for my group and probably a lot of groups for that matter, that a system designed specifically for its setting creates a much stronger connection between mechanics, lore, and story. The rules aren’t simply dropped on top of the world; they are part of the world.
This works much better than “generic” systems adapted to settings. In fact, I consider this to be one of D&D’s most prolific flaws as a system, despite it being responsible for the creation of some of my favorite fantasy settings.
I love the approach to story Dolmenwood takes, not just in how the books for this campaign are written, but how the writer understands that the point of a campaign setting is to be a starting point for the creativity of a GM. It hands you a seed that you can plant and grow yourself. Dolmenwood doesn’t give you a whole story, it gives you just enough for you to create your own and as such, its not a complete work, it requires a GM to write the script.
It always happens that the system just doesn’t quite match the story.
In Dolmenwood, everything from race and class selection to spells, abilities, skills, and even the aesthetic of the equipment has a story behind it. More importantly, these aren’t just bits of flavor text. They have connections to the game world that players can discover as they explore it.
Dolmenwood is also sword-and-sorcery medieval fantasy in tone, yet it departs heavily from the traditional Tolkien aesthetic and themes. This gives the game a darker, meaner, and sometimes much stranger edge, while still keeping you firmly in recognizable fantasy territory.
More importantly, it stays quite distant from the superhero fantasy of modern D&D. You are mortal creatures. You are vulnerable. You are very often outmatched by the fantastical things inhabiting this world, and that vulnerability gives those things weight.
One potential complaint I expect to field from my group is the setting’s heavy inspiration from folklore and fairy tales, which includes anthropomorphic creatures like the Grimalkin, shapeshifting cat-like people.
Yeah… I can already hear the grumbling.
I don’t think it’s going to be game-breaking, however. There are plenty of other cool choices, including naturally humans and elves, and given Dolmenwood’s old-school D&D DNA, expanding the options with compatible material isn’t exactly difficult.
Suffice it to say, I think the setting, and in particular the story behind the setting and its deep, inspired writing, is a fantastic foundation for a lot of very cool adventures.
Which brings me to the big picture.
A Grand Story With Freedom of Choice
One big thing I always look for in a role-playing game is a well-defined, structured, and organized story built into the world I’m going to run.
This is probably why games like Vampire: The Masquerade and Alternity’s Star*Drive campaign setting remain among my favorites. I’m a sucker for a great backdrop: a deep, expansive story built into the setting that occupies the imaginations of the players regardless of what goals they ultimately decide to pursue.
Dolmenwood has that in spades.
Grand history. Ancient enemies. Cultural dilemmas. Wars. Geopolitical maneuvering. Old grudges. Weird mysteries. All of that good stuff that gives players something to attach themselves to a cause, an identity, a belief and, most importantly, a sense of direction and purpose.
Many parts of Dolmenwood are really fleshed out, in particular some of the historical bad guys like The Cold Prince. To me, this is a critical part of a good setting, I want to know who the big bad guys are, what are they up to, what motivates them. Dolmenwood understands this and really gives you the tools to bring these bad guys to life.
Dolmenwood is a story filled with secrets and forgotten, dangerous places, but these aren’t simply “adventuring locations” waiting around for the players to clear them out. Everything is a set piece in a larger story.
More importantly, the history of Dolmenwood isn’t just a bunch of stuff that happened centuries ago and now sits in the campaign book as background reading for the GM. Its history is alive. The grudges, conflicts, mysteries and consequences of the past are specifically designed to matter right now.
That is the magic trick.
As soon as the players start exploring the world, they start discovering these things and inevitably become involved in the grand story hidden between the many pages of the campaign setting.
Because the mechanics themselves are also tied to that story, the players have an immediate sense of relevance in the game world. They aren’t tourists visiting Dolmenwood. They belong there.
Inevitably, they are going to become an important part of its history.
For me, that’s the perfect setup for a great D&D campaign: give the players a world already in motion, then let them choose sides and write their own script for how the story unfolds.
Mechanically Familiar & Simple
When I say I want to run D&D, I mean something fairly specific, and Dolmenwood is unmistakably D&D.
Anyone who has played D&D before is going to understand what is going on almost immediately, yet there are aspects of Dolmenwood that I think lean into the best parts of classic D&D while quietly cutting away some of the worst.
Dolmenwood is based on Old School Essentials, but where OSE was a generic system for sword and sorcery fantasy, effectively a re-edit of Basic/Expert rules, Dolmenwood is reworked with the specific setting and style that setting is trying to bring to the table. It’s so much more vivid and in focus and it’s precisely this focus that I think makes it stand out so far and beyond the game on which its based.
Gone are archaic concepts like THAC0, descending Armor Class and some of the stranger old-school subsystems. In their place are quick, standardized and easy-to-remember mechanics, with some mathematical footwork done behind the scenes to simplify elements like skill checks and combat sequencing.
In fact, many of the “new” things in Dolmenwood are really just improved versions of old things, which helps cement the idea that this is still D&D, simply designed with an eye toward modernization.
One of my favorite aspects of the game is the attention paid to areas of adventuring that traditionally become routine bookkeeping.
Dolmenwood absolutely caters to the survival aspect of old-school D&D, but it simplifies much of the resource management in a way that reminds me of Forbidden Lands. Food, water, arrows, torches and other supplies still matter because they are critical to maintaining that survival experience, but you aren’t constantly buried in microscopic bookkeeping just to preserve it.
The combat routine in particular is something I like a lot.
D&D combat has a tendency to get bogged down. It’s often slow, highly mechanical, and intensely tactical, which I have always found strangely contradictory to the fast-moving pulp fantasy heroics the game is supposedly trying to portray.
Dolmenwood goes in the other direction.
Combat is gritty, fast, furious and dangerous. Rounds are still sufficiently structured to ensure combat is tactically more interesting than a simple roll-off, but the sequence is logical and intuitive enough that the storytelling remains at the forefront.
You’re not just pulling mechanical levers off a character sheet. You’re describing actions in a role-playing rhythm, while the tactical layer quietly supports what is happening in the fiction.
Players still have roles to fill. Jobs to perform. Things they excel at. Vulnerabilities that matter.
It feels like a fight rather than a board game interrupting the role-playing session.
A Foundational Campaign
One thing about my players, and I suspect this may register with a lot of groups out there, is that they don’t really want one-shots, short adventures or to walk into a game knowing their stay is limited to X number of sessions before the story is over.
They want broad, long-term campaigns. They just don’t want to commit to one.
Welcome to adult role-playing.
A weekly campaign spanning several years is absolutely in their wheelhouse conceptually; they simply can’t reliably afford the time. So they’re resistant to short-term games while simultaneously being unable to commit to long-term ones.
It’s a wonderfully stupid problem.
I think the best answer is what I would call a foundational campaign: a setting where you can have adventures and build characters without committing to some enormous predetermined campaign arc.
The story isn’t the commitment. The place is.
The Dolmenwood Campaign Book is a massive tome, overflowing with story seeds, adventures, bad guys, awesome locations, factions, culture and so much more. Everything is written with usability in mind, you don’t have to read this book cover to cover to run a good Dolmenwood campaign. Turn to any page and it’s always a self contained, clearly defined thing you can use at the table. Gavin Norman, the creator of Dolmenwood is a master editor. The book is pitch perfect.
It’s somewhere the group can continually return to, building a shared history together, building familiarity with its denizens, and picking things up wherever they left off even if the real-world time span between sessions is months apart.
Dolmenwood is written almost perfectly for that style of play.
There are countless plots, adventure locations, strange people, mysteries and individual stories. While the whole setting is connected through a handful of larger narratives, you don’t have to embark on some epic multi-year quest to get satisfaction out of it.
There is simply a ton to do.
It’s a little bit like Diablo in that sense. You can do everything from a single-session delve to a multi-part adventure, to a grand epic quest, and none of it feels wasted because everything exists within the same lore, history and milieu.
Every adventure adds another little piece to the group’s history with the place.
Dolmenwood is good for a visit of almost any length.
Extreme Compatibility
The final piece is Dolmenwood’s compatibility with the enormous ecosystem of D&D and OSR material, and this is where the real magic happens for a GM like me.
Because underneath everything, Dolmenwood is delightfully, recognizably D&D, adapting material from across the game’s history is generally pretty painless.
Classic monsters, adventures, magic items, dungeons, and ideas can all be pulled into Dolmenwood without having to rebuild the entire game around them. Old-school and OSR material in particular is practically begging to be raided for parts, while material from newer editions can usually be converted with a little common sense.
And that matters.
After fifty years, D&D has accumulated a ludicrous amount of material. Adventures, settings, monsters, classes, spells, magic items, house rules, weird subsystems, and thousands upon thousands of ideas created by professionals, hobbyists, and lunatics with access to a word processor.
Dolmenwood gives me access to that library without forcing me to inherit all of D&D’s baggage along with it.
That’s the sweet spot.
It feels a little like a vanilla version of D&D, except one that has been remastered with modern sensibilities. It avoids much of the mechanical weirdness of old-school D&D while simultaneously sidestepping the overcooked “lever systems” of modern D&D.
The result is one of the more flexible D&D architectures I’ve encountered. And for a GM, flexibility is freedom.
It means that when I find a great monster, adventure, mechanic, dungeon or idea buried somewhere in fifty years of D&D history, my first thought doesn’t have to be:
“Can I make this work?” It’s usually: “Where can I put it?”
That swings the door wide open for creativity.
And perhaps that’s ultimately the strongest argument I can make for Dolmenwood.
It’s a version of D&D that rarely has to say no.
Conclusion
This turned out to be a much bigger article than I expected, and I’m not even sure how many people out there will relate to my very specific local gaming dilemma. But if this blog is anything, it’s an ongoing dialogue about my gaming experiences, and figuring out what RPGs I actually want to run and play has always been a never-ending challenge for me.
In fact, it’s been a while since I’ve actually run anything, in part because I’m picky about what I run. I don’t want to start a campaign simply for the sake of having a game on the calendar. I want to be excited about it, and I want to believe that what I’m putting in front of my players has a real chance of working for us.
Whether or not Dolmenwood actually makes it to the table remains to be seen.
What I do have, however, is the strange satisfaction of finally having made a decision. After digging through editions, variants, old-school games, modern games and all the different ideas about what D&D is supposed to be, I’ve landed somewhere.
If I’m going to run D&D again, Dolmenwood is the game I’m going to run.
A decision contemplated, dissected, and finally made.
Søren is a guest writer here at Gamersdungeon, and we are thrilled to have him. It’s been a well-established goal that I have wanted to achieve to have more voices speaking through the Gamersdungeon platform, so big thanks, Søren, for your contribution. You’re always welcome! – Gamersdungeon
The best licensed games do not merely put familiar names on cards and miniatures. They ask a harder question: what should this universe force the player to do?
Star Wars is unusually easy to decorate a game with. Put Darth Vader on the box, scatter a few TIE fighters across the table, add a Wilhelm scream at a suitable moment and the licence is immediately doing visible work. The harder part begins when the box is open. A game can look exactly like Star Wars and still behave like something that could have been about medieval merchants, colonial railways or highly competitive turnip farmers. Theme is cheap when it only changes the nouns. The interesting licensed games are the ones where the verbs change too.
That is one reason Trials of Maya is such a useful recent example of the broader problem. A MOBA-inspired tabletop game cannot simply borrow colourful heroes and lanes as scenery; it has to translate a genre built around unique abilities, pressure, positioning and team roles into decisions that survive contact with cardboard. Star Wars tabletop design faces the same test. The galaxy already arrives with forty-nine years of expectations attached. The rules either turn those expectations into pressure, or they leave them sitting politely in the artwork.
The most interesting Star Wars games usually choose the former. Star Wars: Rebellion makes the Empire and the Rebel Alliance feel different before anybody quotes a film. Outer Rim turns the scoundrel fantasy into an economy of fame, jobs and people who are angry with you. Armada makes commanding a capital ship feel like issuing an order to something too large to change its mind quickly. The Clone Wars takes the relentless spread of a galactic conflict and turns it into cooperative triage. And, now, Zero Company shows that the same philosophy works when the table becomes a screen.
Rebellion: asymmetry does the storytelling
Rebellion works because its two sides are not simply different colours with slightly different unit values. The Empire has ships, troops, production and enough plastic to make the table look as though somebody has emptied a military warehouse onto it. The Rebels have a secret. Their base is hidden, the Empire has to find it, and almost every major decision follows from that imbalance. One side occupies space and gathers information. The other side survives by being difficult to locate, disrupting plans and making every Imperial deployment feel faintly suspicious.
Star Wars Rebellion is often described as “Star Wars In a Box”, a sentiment I fully agree with. It truly captures the sensation of watching A New Hope, with every mechanical and thematic detail perfectly captured. I fully agree with Soren here; it’s almost a magic trick what they manage to pull off with this game mechanically.
-Gamersdungeon
That sounds obvious because it is exactly how the original trilogy works, but that is the achievement. The hidden base is not flavour text explaining why the Rebel player starts with fewer pieces. It is the central engine. Probe cards eliminate possibilities. Imperial fleets spread out because ignorance is expensive. Rebel missions create diversions because a weaker military force cannot afford to play the same game as its opponent. Even the victory conditions are telling different stories: the Empire needs to discover and crush the base, while the Rebels need to outlast the machine long enough for resistance and reputation to grow.
There is a useful comparison with War of the Ring, another licensed design where asymmetry is not a balance problem to be sanded down but the entire point. Sauron should have armies the Free Peoples cannot sensibly match. The Fellowship should have a different route to victory. In both games, the source material gives the designer permission to make the players uncomfortable in different ways. Balance does not require sameness. In fact, sameness would destroy the fiction.
Rebellion is not beyond criticism. Repeated play can expose its structure, and the hunt for the base can occasionally end with the strategic equivalent of opening the correct cupboard by accident. But even those weaknesses reveal how completely the theme and mechanism are fused. If the search loses tension, the game loses Star Wars with it. That is a far more interesting failure than a game whose theme could be replaced by changing the card art.
Outer Rim: Han Solo is a job description
Outer Rim operates at the opposite scale. There is no galactic command chair, no Death Star to position and no reason to care which government controls the Core. The fantasy is smaller and, in its own way, more recognisably Star Wars: get a ship, find work, improve the ship, hire somebody useful, annoy the wrong faction, and become famous enough that people eventually stop asking whether the hyperdrive was legally acquired.
Never had the pleasure, but it’s been on my radar for a long time. I have an affinity for Corey Konieczka’s work, in fact, looking at my gaming shelves, this designer takes up a lot of shelf space. I believe it’s his attention to detail when it comes to linking theme and mechanics together flawlessly that sets him apart as a designer.
-Gamersdungeon
The goal is fame, but the important part is how many roads lead there. Bounties ask you to hunt people. Jobs turn the map into a chain of opportunities and complications. Cargo can be profitable until a patrol takes an interest. Reputation with the Empire, Rebels, Hutts and crime syndicates changes how safely you can move through the same space. The result is that being a scoundrel is not communicated by a portrait of Han Solo grinning from a card. It is communicated by the fact that your best plan is often profitable, questionable and likely to create a second problem before it solves the first.
That is what good thematic design does. It asks what behaviour the fiction should produce. Star Wars smugglers are not interesting because they own fast ships. They are interesting because they live inside networks of debts, favours, employers, rivals and authorities. Outer Rim turns those relationships into a playable economy. A patrol is not just an enemy token. It is a reminder that your previous decisions have a memory.
Armada: a Star Destroyer should not corner like a shopping trolley
Armada may be the purest example of a physical mechanism explaining fictional scale. Star Wars has always told us that capital ships are enormous, but film can cheat. A camera cuts, John Williams does the heavy lifting, and suddenly several kilometres of metal seem perfectly nimble. A tabletop game has to make mass something you can feel.
Soren is absolutetly correct here that Star Wars Armada captures the sensation of what we see on screen mechanically. The added magic trick is that Armada is a deep well of strategic possibilities. This is a war game in the purest sense, with a tremendous amount of Star Wars-based sci-fi realism assumptions that work as strategies. It remains one of my favorite miniature games of all time, a true masterpiece.
-Gamersdungeon
The command stack does exactly that. Larger ships plan commands in advance, with orders buried in a queue before they are executed. A navigation command chosen now may be the thing that saves you later, assuming you guessed correctly about where the battle would be by then. That delay creates command friction without requiring a thirty-page subsystem about naval bureaucracy. The Star Destroyer feels large because your intentions take time to travel through it.
Movement reinforces the same idea. The manoeuvre tool does not merely measure distance; it gives large ships arcs, inertia and commitments. You are steering a capital vessel, not dragging a miniature to a convenient spot because the ruler says it fits. The contrast with the movement-first design of Star Wars: X-Wing is instructive. X-Wing uses hidden manoeuvre dials to create the uncertainty of a dogfight, where reading an opponent matters because fighters can change the geometry of a battle in seconds. Armada slows that thought process down. Both games are about Star Wars ships, but they are not asking the same question.
This is where a licence becomes useful rather than restrictive. The designer does not need one universal movement system for every spacecraft. A TIE fighter and an Imperial-class Star Destroyer should not feel related simply because both have engines. One is a knife fight. The other is urban planning with turbolasers.
The Clone Wars: Pandemic becomes a war
Star Wars: The Clone Wars takes a more visible shortcut because its foundation is the Pandemic System. That could easily have produced a reskin: replace disease cubes with battle droids, rename outbreaks, put a Jedi on the cover and go home early. Instead, the useful question is what the Pandemic structure already understands. Pressure spreads. Problems multiply while you are solving different problems. No player can be everywhere, and ignoring one region because another looks more dramatic is exactly how a manageable board becomes a disaster.
I’m going to have to take Soren’s word on this one; I have neither played Star Wars Clone Wars, nor am I a particularly big fan of the Pandemic series in general. For me, the issue that Soren suggests is not a problem in this variant of Pandemic games is that it suffers from “Alpha Gamer Syndrome,” where a single, experienced player is pretty much going to dictate the decisions for the less experienced players.
-Gamersdungeon
That rhythm fits the Clone Wars remarkably well. Jedi move from planet to planet, droids accumulate, blockades obstruct routes, missions demand attention and villains push the game toward specific kinds of trouble. The system creates the feeling that the Republic is permanently short of time. Winning is not about clearing the map and admiring a clean galaxy. It is about deciding which crisis can be allowed to remain ugly for one more turn.
The best cooperative games understand that cooperation needs adversity rather than politeness. The appeal of designs built around genuine shared pressure is that the table has to negotiate priorities, not merely distribute chores. The Clone Wars inherits that strength from Pandemic and gives it a particularly suitable costume. Ahsoka, Obi-Wan and their allies are powerful, but the war is larger than any one of them. A Jedi can solve the problem in front of them. The rules make sure there is always another planet on fire.
Zero Company: the rules engine leaves the table
The interesting thing is that this design philosophy no longer stops at the edge of the table. Star Wars Zero Company is a single-player turn-based tactics game rather than a board game, but it is wrestling with the same question: how do you make the Clone Wars behave like more than a backdrop for blaster fire? Its answer is to make people, time and preparation into resources.
Everyone is talking about this game right now, it’s being hailed as one of the best Star Wars Games ever made by some reviewers, a claim I have heard many times said about many Star Wars Games. It does look awesome, and it’s definitely on the list!
-Gamersdungeon
On the battlefield, operators spend action points to move, attack, assist, use abilities and hold positions with overwatch. That is the familiar tactical layer. The more interesting translation happens around it. At the Den, the company chooses between missions and non-combat operations, and it cannot do everything in a cycle. Injured operators may be poor choices for dangerous deployments. Relationships between squad members can strengthen or weaken, with bonds unlocking combat synergies. Optional permadeath means a bad decision can become a permanent absence rather than a quick reload-shaped inconvenience.
A complete Zero Company guide quickly becomes less about listing guns and more about explaining those interlocking systems: squad builds, bonds, recovery, resources, the Den and the consequences of deciding who goes where. That is precisely why the game belongs in this conversation. The Clone Wars are not only represented by clone armour, familiar planets and a Jedi in the squad. The fiction is asking the player to behave like the commander of a small organisation operating inside a conflict far larger than itself.
There is a faint tabletop logic to the whole thing. You look at a roster, weigh limited actions, accept that one objective may have to be sacrificed for another and then live with the state you created. The computer handles the arithmetic, animation and line-of-sight calculations, but the dramatic mechanism is familiar: scarcity turns lore into decisions. The player does not merely watch a squad become close. The rules pay out when those relationships become tactically useful, and punish you when people are injured, unavailable or dead.
The real question is what the licence makes you do
Licensed games are often judged first by recognition. Does Vader look right? Are the miniatures detailed? Is the terminology correct? Those things matter, especially with a universe as obsessively catalogued as Star Wars, but they are the easy part. A game can pass every visual inspection and still feel strangely hollow once the first turn begins.
The stronger test is mechanical. The Empire should make you feel powerful and blind at the same time. A smuggler should make money by creating future complications. A Star Destroyer should force you to think several minutes ahead because several kilometres of warship cannot simply perform a tidy little U-turn. A Jedi in the Clone Wars should be extraordinary and still unable to be on six planets at once. A mercenary squad should become more valuable, and more frightening to risk, as its people develop relationships and history.
One example I think could have been part of this list to make the point is Star Wars: The Queen’s Gambit. Strangely, the game does such an amazing job of linking theme and mechanics that it’s gained cult status among board game and Star Wars fans alike, and this is despite the fact that it’s actually not a particularly good game. It just nails that connection so well that it becomes “good” despite its flaws. It nails the point home that when theme and mechanics are synced up, even a mediocre game becomes good.
This is also why thematic games can survive long after the pleasure of recognising the artwork has faded. Star Wars: Destiny and Star Wars: Unlimited approach the licence through another design tradition entirely, but the same tension remains: familiar characters can attract us to the table, while the system has to give them something meaningful to do once they arrive. Theme is not the presence of Luke Skywalker. Theme is the set of pressures that makes a player understand why Luke Skywalker matters here.
That is the difference between Star Wars as decoration and Star Wars as a rules engine. A TIE fighter is a miniature; uncertainty and speed make it a dogfighter. A bounty hunter is a portrait; fame, contracts and faction heat make it a career. The Clone Wars is a logo; cascading crises make it a war. When the design gets that translation right, the game stops asking us to admire the galaxy from outside. It makes us obey its logic for a few hours.
And that may be the finest trick a licensed game can pull. The box eventually closes, the miniatures go back into their trays, and somebody spends ten minutes looking for the one token that has somehow migrated under the sofa. But for the length of the game, the rules made the galaxy exist.
–About the author–
Søren Kamper is the editor of Star Wars: Gaming, an independent site covering the history, design and present-day world of Star Wars video games. He has been writing about Star Wars games since 2009.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to find some way to monetize Gamers Dungeon.
There’s just been one rather large problem.
I hate ads.
I also hate the idea of pushing random “stuff” at you that I wouldn’t buy myself just because someone is willing to pay me to do it. That’s never really been what Gamers Dungeon is about, and after 12 years, I’m certainly not going to start turning the place into a billboard now.
There is, however, an unavoidable reality to running a website for 12 years: it costs money. And those costs have continued to creep up year after year.
Gamers Dungeon has reached the point where I’d really like the site to start paying for at least some of itself.
Well, I think I’ve finally found a way to do that.
The Gamers Dungeon Affiliate Program
Over the years, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have publishers and designers send me games to review. That certainly helps with the cost of running the site, but I’ve always felt a little weird about selling those review copies afterward.
I don’t know…. It just feels wrong somehow.
At the same time, when I find a great game and spend countless hours playing it, and writing about it and ultimately recommending it, that recommendation has value.
So I thought: why not put those two things together?
Going forward, when I find a game I really like, I’m going to try to establish an affiliate relationship with the publisher, crowdfunding campaign, or online store selling it.
That means that if you read one of my reviews, think “damn, that sounds awesome,” and decide to buy the game through a Gamers Dungeon affiliate link, I’ll receive a small cut of the sale.
It won’t cost you anything extra.
More importantly, the affiliate relationship isn’t what gets a game recommended. I’ll still review games exactly as I always have. If I think something sucks, an affiliate link isn’t going to magically make it good.
But there’s another part to this.
You Get Something Too!
Every month, I’m going to hold a raffle for readers who purchased games through Gamers Dungeon affiliate links.
And the prizes?
Games!
Specifically, games I’ve reviewed here on Gamers Dungeon over the years.
If you purchase a game through one of our affiliate links, you’ll have a chance to win something from the ever-growing Gamers Dungeon review collection. Winners will only need to cover the cost of shipping.
That means your purchase helps support Gamers Dungeon, helps support the designers and publishers creating the games we love, and gives you a chance to get another game out of the deal.
Meanwhile, I get to reclaim a little shelf space.
Everybody wins!
At least, that’s the idea.
Hopefully, this feels like a fair and unobtrusive way to help keep Gamers Dungeon alive without filling the site with ads or turning every article into a sales pitch.
If you’re going to buy a game I’ve recommended anyway, using one of the affiliate links is a small way to support the site, and it genuinely helps.
Thanks for reading Gamers Dungeon, whether you’ve been here for 12 years or stumbled through the door yesterday.
Here’s to another 12 years of playing far too many board games.
I’m a huge League of Legends fan. It’s kind of my secret hobby. I don’t play with anyone I know, I rarely talk about it or write about it, but each season I like to test myself and see how far I can push my official league rank. I’m never particularly good, but I’ve been playing for the better part of a decade, so you could say I’m pretty well-versed and passionate about this genre of gaming.
That’s why when Trials of Maya landed in my lap, a card-driven, MOBA-style tactical tabletop battler trying with all of its heart and soul to capture the excitement of the MOBA genre- to say I’m very excited is a serious understatement.
MOBA’s (Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas) like League of Legends are massive e-sports and businesses. Millions of people play and spectate every day; there are major events taking place all over the world all the time that draw huge crowds. So far as video games go, it’s pretty serious.
Reviewing Trials of Maya, however, was always going to be…. complicated.
In a sense, I know too much. I’ve seen too much, and I have way too many opinions about what makes MOBA tick. More importantly, Trials of Maya is a passion project, and I have a tremendous soft spot for those. I love independent publishers willing to pursue a clear vision, take risks, and put something genuinely personal into the world rather than rehashing the same old thing.
Trials of Maya isn’t some marketing-infused product rolling off a faceless corporate assembly line. It’s something a group of gamers dreamed about, struggled with, and eventually found the courage to put into the hands of people like me.
That makes criticism complicated.
I’ve played Trials of Maya. I’ve analyzed it. I’ve written, deleted, and rewritten parts of this review more times than I care to admit. I’ve argued with myself about scores and repeatedly wondered whether I was giving the game too much credit in some places and not enough in others.
Eventually, however, I had to put pen to paper and commit to the words I conjured up… For better or worse, this is my review!
Consider this my disclaimer.
Trials of Maya isn’t simply another game for me to review. It’s someone’s dream made tangible, built around a genre I’m perhaps embarrassingly serious about. It’s passion given form by creators who decided playing games wasn’t enough. They wanted to make one, pour themselves into it, and then take that terrifying leap of faith required to put it into the world and ask the rest of us to judge it.
The Trials of Maya crowdfunder kicks off in about 24 hours as of this writing; one can only imagine the nerves of these creative people who have spent the better part of half a decade working on a project with it all coming down to this one critical do-or-die moment. I have nothing but empathy, compassion, and respect for such bravery.
Unknown to the publishers and designers, however, they accidentally stumbled across a board game reviewer who probably knows more about what MOBA is all about than I imagine the vast majority of people who will review this game. My perspective is, without question, colored and seasoned by a decade-long love affair with this genre.
I lay all this out because I think it’s only fair to really understand who is speaking here. It’s a bit like the difference between a music fan reviewing an album and a musician doing so. These are not the same perspectives.
So with that bit of soul-searching out of the way, let’s talk about Trials of Maya and see if I can find that delicate middle ground between empathy and honesty while offering, dare I say it, the opinion of a MOBA veteran.
Overview
Final Score: (4.50 out of 5) Awesome Game!
While artistry is definitely a major vein running to the heart of Trials of Maya, and almost certainly the first thing that will inspire and attract gamers to it, the soul of this game is its tremendous effort to capture the unique playstyle of a MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena).
And when I say capture it, I don’t mean simply borrow some terminology, throw a few miniatures onto an arena, and call it a MOBA. Trials of Maya goes considerably further than that, and perhaps this is why my attention to detail here might exceed what is really required from a typical board game review.
It begins with the Champions.
There is absolutetly no question where Trials of Maya inspiration comes from; there is a clear and unmistakable historical lineage to the roots of the MOBA genre, in the art, in the theme, in the mechanics, and really in the soul of this game, and nowhere is that more true than when you look at the Champion line-up. If you have a favorite League of Legends or DOTA champion, you will find a Trials of Maya variant. That isn’t mimicry or a lack of originality; it’s understanding and respecting your audience.
Each Champion is a genuinely asymmetric character with unique abilities, passive powers, and, perhaps most importantly, their own customizable collection of cards that drive their actions and define their impact on the battlefield. Champions fall broadly into the sort of familiar combat identities any MOBA veteran will immediately recognize. Tanks, ranged damage dealers, spell slingers, support characters, and various hybrids all have a place here.
The terminology may be slightly different in Trials of Maya, but the language of the genre is unmistakable.
More importantly, choosing a Champion is only the beginning. Your deck can be customized before the battle from the cards available to that Champion, while progression during the game allows you to further develop your character through what amounts to a miniature advancement tree, aka leveling up. The result is that two players sitting down with the same Champion are not necessarily going to approach that Champion in quite the same way.
Deck construction is very simple, each card in the game belongs to either a species or class (or both), and each champion is a member of a species and two classes. All you have to do is match up the symbols, and that card is legal in your deck. This allows for a very broad design space and tons of combinations that you will invent and re-invent a hundred times over. Like MOBA champions in video games, a single champion can wear many hats.
That distinction is important.
My prototype copy of Trials of Maya included four playable Champions, and initially I worried that this simply wouldn’t be enough variety for a game so heavily dependent on asymmetric characters. The version currently being prepared for crowdfunding, however, is considerably larger. The developers are advertising nine Champions, more than 340 cards, several game modes, and support for one to four players. No doubt, much more than that may arise between now and the conclusion of the crowdfunding campaign.
Trials of Maya is being envisioned as an expandable combat system. If the game finds its audience, it’s not difficult to imagine where that road leads.
More Champions. More cards. More combinations. More arenas. More ways to play.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and while having access to more Champions during this review would certainly have been awesome, I discovered that there was considerably more to explore within those four characters than the number might suggest. The deck customization alone creates an almost intimidating amount of experimentation as you begin discovering different builds, combinations, and approaches to using the same Champion.
Then we have the battlefield itself.
This is the second great pillar of Trials of Maya as a game and arguably where its MOBA credentials become impossible to ignore.
Minions move through the arena. Objectives must be contested. Positioning matters. Movement matters. Timing matters. Team coordination matters.
Heroes shove, pull, strike, maneuver, and unleash special abilities in what is an elaborate and intricate ballet of combat. You are constantly thinking about where you’re standing, where your opponent might move, what your teammate is preparing to do, and whether committing to an attack now is worth exposing yourself to whatever comes next. That is, without question, the very essence of MOBA gameplay.
There is a ton of stuff you can do on your turn with any given combination of champion abilities, skills, and cards, but everything is organized and condensed into basic action categories that help streamline the game’s action. Very well tested, practical, and reduced down to the absolute essentials.
This is not a game where the board simply tells you how far away something is.
The arena is part of the weapon, a consideration for your strategy, a critical component of your tactics.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is the wonderfully subtle question of balance within all of these choices.
Which Champion do you select? Which cards do you bring? Which cards do you ultimately play into your tableau? How do those choices alter the actions available to you? How much energy do you have to fuel those actions? Which abilities do you develop as the battle progresses? How do you alter your strategy when you realize exactly what the opposing Champion is trying to accomplish?
What is going to be effective in battle is also going to depend on the gamemode you are using. A one vs. one siege mode means you only get a single champion on a much tighter field of battle where in a two vs. two siege mode you have two champions with much more space. That, in itself, we found, had a lot of impact on what cards you put in the deck and how you approach the game as a whole. The publisher recently announced a 3 vs. 3 siege mode as well, which is going to have a total of six champions on the battlefield; I can only imagine how different that will make the game. Point is, Trials of Maya is really many different games in one.
This is where Trials of Maya starts becoming less about executing a plan and more about constructing one while someone else is actively trying to dismantle it. Again, the very essence of MOBA gameplay.
All those interactions and mechanics must find a way for this game to be fair, to be balanced; anyone who has ever played a MOBA knows just how impossible such a task is, and replicating this to the tabletop comes with the same challenges.
In a broader sense, Trials of Maya is an explosion of all those nuanced little expectations a MOBA player might reasonably hope to find when opening this monster of a box. Champions. Builds. Abilities. Energy management. Minions. Objectives. Positioning. Combos. Progression. Team fights.
It’s all here.
And that leads me to what I think is one of the easiest and perhaps most relevant conclusions I will make anywhere in this review, and I can make it here and now in the overview.
Regardless of whether it ultimately succeeds or fails as an entertaining board game for the masses or for your local gaming crew, Trials of Maya captures everything that makes MOBAs addictive and brings it roaring to the tabletop.
Trials of Maya captures everything that makes MOBAs addictive and brings it roaring to the tabletop.
There are no cheap tricks here. No vague abstractions designed to convince you that something sort of resembles a MOBA if you squint hard enough.
Trials of Maya understands the assignment. It wants to be a tabletop MOBA game, and it nails that with resounding success. Hands down the best tabletop version of a MOBA game I have played.
The considerably more difficult question, and ultimately the one we are here to answer, is whether all of those wonderfully recreated MOBA concepts actually combine to make a great board game that will resonate with the boardgaming community that may not be familiar with the genre, its history, and its niche nuances. What happens when you play Trials of Maya without all that history and passion for the genre?
It’s here that I am going to start stumbling over my carefully chosen words, searching for some honesty and truth amidst my own self-imposed compromises as a fan who desperately wants this project to succeed because I am indeed a huge MOBA fan.
One final point before we descend into that particular abyss.
There is actually considerably more game in the box than what I am going to cover in this review. Trials of Maya currently advertises several different game modes and supports everything from solo play to team battles and free-for-alls, it endeavors to be much more than just a MOBA. I directed and mostly focused my experience on trying to understand this game to answer my specific question that was most relevant to what I wanted to get out of this game.
How well does this game capture the MOBA genre…?
The original MOBA game concepts can trace their lineage all the way back to the late 90’s with games like Aeon of Strife and Defense of the Ancients, originally mods to other games. Since then, the concept has evolved and splintered in various ways, creating many sub-genres and unique takes on the genre. Suffice it to say, what is and isn’t a MOBA concept could be a matter of debate, but I don’t think anyone who plays Trials of Maya and has been involved in any MOBA during any era of play will have any trouble making the connection here.
That was the experience I wanted from Trials of Maya, so that is where I spent the overwhelming majority of my time. I dipped my toes into some of the other modes, but Trials of Maya is a very big game that already took many plays to properly evaluate, and this review is going to be a monster based purely on the experience with that core gameplay, the competitive MOBA-inspired game. Diving too far beyond that would make this already insanely long review unreadable.
Hopefully that paints a sufficient picture of the battlefield.
Now let’s go looking for the devil in the details.
Components
Score: Tilt:
Pros: Epic box with tons of content and variation, great manual, great design.
Cons: Some components are fiddly and fall over easily.
Before getting into components, there is a vital disclaimer that needs to be planted firmly at the top of this section.
I am reviewing a prototype.
That comes with the very important understanding that these are neither the final components nor, technically speaking, the final version of the game. Judging prototype components as if they were coming out of a finished retail box would not only be unfair; it would be rather pointless.
So I approached this section with a generous eye toward what is clearly a game that will still likely see some development before launch, while trying to remain realistic about what works, what doesn’t, and, perhaps with a side order of amateur advice, what I might do differently.
Let’s start with something that requires no such generosity.
The manuals, rules index, and reference cards are exceptional.
In fact, what I received with this prototype is already far beyond what I have seen accompanying plenty of finished and released crowdfunded games. Trials of Maya is a fairly complex game with a substantial vocabulary of rules, abilities, interactions, and exceptions, and having good documentation is not simply a luxury here. It’s essential.
Thankfully, the designers appear to understand that.
The material is well-organized, easy to navigate, and enormously helpful both while learning the game and when hunting down some obscure interaction in the middle of a battle. This is exactly the sort of attention to detail that more complex games desperately need and so often fail to receive.
Excellent work.
While I think the rules are well written and the rulebook laid out beautifully, I don’t think reading the rules is going to give you a clear picture of what it’s like to play Trials of Maya. There is a lot of subtle nuance; the experience of playing the game and reading the game have a much wider gap than most games. In fact, even the first introductory game you play of Trials of Maya is not very representative of the full experience.
The cards, arguably the most important physical component in Trials of Maya, are equally impressive.
You are going to handle these things constantly, and thankfully they are exceptionally well designed. The iconography is clean, the language is generally clear, and there is an intuitive simplicity to their layout that makes processing information surprisingly easy given how much is actually going on. I can’t speak to the final quality of the stock, as my cards were clearly prototype quality. I expect the stock quality will be much higher in the final product.
My only request comes courtesy of this old hound dog’s increasingly questionable eyesight.
Bigger text, please.
The anatomy of cards speaks volumes to just how wildly different each card can be and the weight of any given card’s impact on the game. A card like Whirling Weights has far more implications for the game than you will discover the first few times you play. Once you get going and really dive into the many effects and stats represented by the iconography of cards, you will find yourself debating benefits and drawbacks of each card in the game obsessively. Suffice to say there are no bad cards; everything is situational.
The player boards are another standout and, frankly, already look final-product worthy to me. They are beautifully designed, wonderfully functional, and do an excellent job of organizing what could otherwise become a fairly intimidating amount of information. Cards, abilities, upgrades, and resources all have their place, and you can evaluate the state of your Champion surprisingly quickly with a glance across the table.
The main battlefield boards are similarly attractive and functional, though this is one place where I would make a change.
I would make them bigger.
Not dramatically bigger, perhaps ten to twenty percent, but enough to give everything a little more room to breathe. Alternatively, some of the components that go on the board could be made smaller.
Trials of Maya can become a crowded game. Champions, minions, health chips, objectives, and various other pieces begin occupying the battlefield and eventually obscure some of the information printed underneath them. This matters because the terrain itself is mechanically important. Higher ground, lower ground, zones, spikes, and other battlefield features added during combat can influence your decisions.
At the start of the game, the battlefield is neatly organized, but once you start moving stuff around, using cards and abilities, this battlefield will get very chaotic and very tight. As big as the battlefield is at first glance, it becomes increasingly more difficult to see it with all the stuff you are going to put into play.
In our plays, we regularly found ourselves lifting miniatures and stacks of health chips simply to answer the question, “What am I actually standing on?” It reminded me a bit of historical war game chits where you are constantly having to handle them not to move them, but to move them out of the way to see important information underneath them.
It’s a minor nuisance rather than a serious problem, but more real estate would improve both usability and readability considerably.
Then we have the miniatures.
These are either exceptional board game pieces or merely fair miniatures, depending entirely on which ruler you use to measure them.
As a miniature wargamer myself, I’m probably a little spoiled. Put these next to the increasingly absurd quality of modern dedicated miniature games, and they are not going to win that beauty contest.
That, however, is hardly a fair comparison.
Measured as board game components, they are way above and beyond what is necessary. The sculpts have plenty of character, they look great on the battlefield, and they give Trials Of Maya the physical presence a game like this absolutely needs. With a little green stuff, some cleanup, and an experienced painting hand, I see no reason why these couldn’t become very respectable painted miniatures.
These are exceptionally nice board game pieces, but miniature wargamers will not be impressed. That is not a fair criticism; in fact, I consider it a compliment in a sense that we are even making the comparison. It illustrates how high the production quality is and how far Trials of Maya pushes it. That you can actually draw a comparison at all with a straight face speaks volumes of the effort here.
There are a couple of problem areas in Trials of Maya.
I point these out cautiously and primarily in the interest of due diligence. More importantly, the designer and publisher are already aware of these particular criticisms and have indicated that they intend to address them before release. For posterity, they must be mentioned.
The first are the poker-style chips used to track the health of minions.
The prototype uses very light plastic chips that simply don’t stack particularly well. They topple over easily, and when several units are running around with towers of health underneath them, one poorly placed hand can suddenly turn the battlefield into an archaeological excavation.
Perhaps this is less of a problem for people who don’t possess my clumsy fat fingers, but I found it genuinely disruptive.
Smaller and heavier replacements would solve the problem immediately.
The spawn points and upgrade points have a similar prototype quirk. These tall standees are somewhat top-heavy, and the suction cup-style bases on my prototype did not always grip the battlefield particularly well. As a result, they were regularly knocked over, especially since their height means you are frequently reaching around or over them to manipulate units.
Again, this feels very much like a prototype problem rather than a design problem, and one the developers are already aware of.
Beyond those issues, Trials of Maya contains a small mountain of tokens, markers, cardboard pieces, and plastic components used to track its various systems. These were all of good quality in my prototype, clearly designed and thoughtfully implemented.
No complaints there.
Finally, I would be remiss not to talk about the art.
Good lord, this is a beautiful game.
Trials of Maya is absolutely drowning in artwork, and so much of it is exceptional. When the entire game is laid out across the table, Champions standing on this strange crimson battlefield surrounded by cards, boards, and wonderfully illustrated components, it has an unmistakable presence.
It looks like Trials of Maya.
That may sound like a strange compliment, but in a hobby filled with thousands of games fighting for our attention, developing a visual identity that is immediately recognizable is no small accomplishment.
You can say whatever you like about the game’s almost fanatical commitment to the color red, but this is clearly an artistic choice and one I can only nod toward in appreciation. I am certainly not qualified to dissect the finer points of artistic theory, but I know when something catches my eye.
Trials of Maya is eye candy to the ninth degree.
More importantly, given everything I have said about this being a passion project, the artwork may be the place where that passion is most visible. There is an enormous amount of original art here, and it gives the game a sense of identity and authorship that feels increasingly precious in our modern age of AI-generated imagery.
And since that question inevitably comes up these days, I checked; I found no evidence that AI-generated artwork was used to create Trials of Maya.
I don’t doubt that Trials of Maya will inevitably be accused of using AI-generated art; at this point, pretty much all games are. Arguably, it’s becoming more and more difficult to spot the difference, but the publisher did release a lot of footage of their team working, and you can see artwork from Trials of Maya in different stages. If this is AI art, you got me fooled.
Whatever criticisms I ultimately level at this game elsewhere in this review, its artists should be immensely proud of what they have created here.
Taken together, the components in my prototype are already exceptional in many places and very promising in others. There are a few rough edges, certainly, but they are exactly the sort of rough edges I would expect to find in a prototype and, importantly, the developers already appear to be sanding them down.
If the final production improves just a little bit on what I have sitting in front of me, I suspect Trials of Maya is going to be one hell of a box to open for fans.
Theme
Score: Tilt:
Pros: Master Class is capturing a video game genre in a board game. Awesome setting, fantastic art.
Cons: Its dedication to the color red some might find excessive.
Trials of Maya is actually only one piece of a much larger narrative universe called Maya, a setting that was developed well before this particular game arrived on my table.
There is already a novel, notably included as part of my prototype package, with ambitions for the universe extending into other mediums including graphic novels and even a proposed film.
I have to admit I have not read the book yet and I do feel guilty about it, but I have not worked on anything but preparing for the Trials of Maya review for nearly 3 weeks, and just about every free moment I have had to dedicate to gamersdungeon.net has been swallowed whole by the effort. I do, however, look forward to reading it, I love it when games put this much effort into their lore.
That’s important because there is considerably more to Maya as a setting than you’re ever going to discover simply by playing the board game.
The world of Neh has some immediately recognizable science-fantasy elements, perhaps most notably some similarities to Avatar’s Pandora. At the heart of this civilization are the enormous Maya trees, a biological network to which billions of people can tether themselves and enter elaborate simulations and experiences.
One such experience is the Trials.
Within the fiction, people can embody legendary Champions and enter simulated arenas where they fight, compete, and test themselves in battle. Looming behind all of this are the Divyas, immensely powerful, almost godlike rulers who use the Maya network to observe humanity, predict behavior, and subtly influence society itself.
There’s considerably more going on here, and I suspect that is exactly why the novel was included with the game. Trials of Maya isn’t merely trying to give you enough flavor text to justify why miniatures are beating the snot out of each other. It wants to trigger curiosity about the larger universe behind the game.
For the purposes of this review, however, we can boil the premise down to something considerably simpler.
The Trials are simulations in which legendary Champions are tested in battle.
That explains the fiction.
I would argue, however, despite a wonderful effort to provide us with a great setting for the game, that it isn’t actually the most important part of the theme of the game.
The real thematic achievement of Trials of Maya is its attempt to replicate the experience and, perhaps more importantly, the culture of classic competitive video game genres, most notably the MOBA.
There are other influences here as well. Across its various modes, you can see echoes of tactical games like Fantasy Tactics and different variations on the arena battle concept, including the glorious chaos League of Legends players will recognize from the ARAM game mode.
Of all the various nuanced MOBA concepts built into Trials of Maya I think from a game mode perspective, the closest comparison I can think of in the genre would be the ARAM mode in League of Legends. It too has a single lane where teams are just trying to push through and destroy their opponent’s base, and you’re always one breakthrough away from collapsing the enemy defenses.
It is the MOBA elements that beat loudest at the heart of the game.
What impressed me is just how specifically identifiable these influences are while playing. Trials of Maya doesn’t simply tell you that it is inspired by MOBAs. You can identify the lineage through the decisions you make, the conversations you have, and eventually even the arguments you get into with the people sitting around the table.
That, to me, is what good theme actually does and means. It says something about the game’s appeal to a specific fandom and community.
There should be a clear connection between what a game claims to be about and what you actually spend your time doing.
What is the game about? How is the game about that?
Trials of Maya has remarkably good answers to both questions.
It achieves this connection in several ways. The first and most obvious is the art.
The visual presentation is immediately reminiscent of the elaborate and often rather bizarre fantasy artwork we have grown accustomed to seeing in games like League of Legends and DOTA. This goes beyond simple mimicry. There is a deliberate attempt to create an unconscious visual connection for anyone familiar with the genre. Again, the artists are speaking directly to the fans.
You look at these Champions and instinctively understand what sort of world they belong to.
I love making these comparisons; it just feels good to know that there is this clean connection to the heart of the genre in Trials of Maya. Here is Trials of Maya’s Naag compared to League of Legends Cassiopeia. They are both fast-moving mages that poison you. Mimicry is the greatest form of flattery; I love it!
The second and considerably more important connection is the Champions themselves.
Champions in Trials of Maya have a tremendous amount of complexity and diversity in their builds, and this is where I think the game captures something considerably more subtle about MOBA culture.
You are going to have opinions about these Champions. Strong opinions.
You’re going to dissect their advantages and weaknesses. You’re going to discover combinations that you think are amazing. You’re going to find a favorite. Someone else is going to tell you that your favorite is terrible or declare it overpowered. Someone is going to disagree with you. Round and round we go.
And then you are going to take those arguments to the battlefield and try to settle them.
That is MOBA culture.
The endless discussion about Champions, builds, counters, strategies, and balance isn’t simply something that happens around games like League of Legends and DOTA. It’s part of the experience of being invested in them.
Trials Of Maya understands this, and it actually, in a sense, explains some of the mechanical and gameplay design decisions that might not register with casual board gamers, as they are aimed squarely at lifetime fans of the genre. A potential problem for the game as a product seeking wider appeal, while being a love letter to the fans, the MOBA culture and genre.
Champion builds and Champion strategies aren’t peripheral systems added to give players some customization. They are central to the experience because they create the same analytical obsession that makes the MOBA genre so endlessly fascinating to its fans.
Then we come to perhaps the most ambitious thematic element of all.
Change. Trials of Maya is intended to be a living ruleset in the same way MOBA’s are living designs.
Trials of Maya has very clearly been designed with room to grow. More Champions, more cards, more builds, and more possibilities can be introduced into the system, and every addition has the potential to force players to re-evaluate what they thought they already understood.
Introduce a couple of new cards for a Champion and suddenly an overlooked strategy might become viable. Give an existing Champion access to a new combination and yesterday’s underdog might become tomorrow’s king of the hill.
The meta changes. Again, that is incredibly MOBA. It also speaks to one important question: is this a lifestyle game? We will need to talk about that a bit later, but the short answer is… Yes, I think so.
There is some danger here.
Unlike a PC game, a physical board game can’t simply download a patch on Tuesday morning because the designers discovered that a Champion is winning 78% of their matches.
Once you print a card, that card exists.
There is certainly design space for corrections, replacements, and alternative cards, but expanding Trials of Maya will require careful curation. Too many additions could eventually make the game unwieldy, and poorly considered additions could create balance problems that aren’t nearly as easy to solve on cardboard as they are with a server-side update.
That is a challenge and responsibility the designers will need to manage carefully.
What matters right now is that Trials of Maya hasn’t been designed simply as a MOBA-inspired board game. It has the bones of something more ambitious.
It wants to become a living game. A game you explore. A game you discuss. In a word, a lifestyle game built around fandom of the genre.
A game where you have a favorite Champion and a favorite build. A game where new releases send you back to old Champions to reconsider them. A game where players debate strategies, discover combinations and develop a shared language around how the game should be played.
In other words, Trials Of Maya isn’t merely trying to recreate how a MOBA plays. It’s trying to recreate what it feels like to be invested in one.
There has been a fair amount of criticism about the way the Trials of Maya crowdfunder release has been subdivided into many add-on products. It has an almost collectable game vibe to it. I do understand and mostly agree with the criticism as it creates an unnecessary FOMO environment that might result in many people deciding to not get the base game at all, out of frustration that they won’t be able to get all the champions, cards, and “stuff” that is actually available for the game. Given that the game endeavors to be a lifestyle game, a more steady and condensed release schedule would have been preferable. One big box with everything!
That distinction is incredibly important to the theme and the gameplay.
The fiction gives Trials of Maya its world. The Champions give it personality. The artwork gives it identity. The mechanics give it authenticity. And the expandable nature of the system gives it the potential to develop the sort of constantly evolving conversation that defines the games that inspired it.
Whether Trials of Maya ultimately finds a large enough audience to become that kind of lifestyle game is impossible for me to predict.
But the foundation is absolutely here.
In terms of theme, I think Trials of Maya has nailed the hammer on the head. This is what I would call a near-perfect execution of theme in a board game. It’s uncompromising, for better or worse, targeting a very specific audience and gaming culture. The designers, artists, and writers clearly had a vision of not only what Trials of Maya should look like, but what playing it should feel like.
They brought that vision to the table in exquisite detail. Thematically, Trials of Maya is the gold standard. If you’re going to commit to a theme and playstyle, for example, like making a MOBA game on the tabletop, this is how you do it.
Gameplay
Score: Tilt:
Pros: Very streamlined and easy-to-understand rules with a lot of strategic and tactical depth. Tons of customization.
Cons: Stalemates can form that grind the action into grueling trench warfare that isn’t very exciting.
In Trials of Maya, players have a very simple objective: get across the battlefield and destroy the enemy tower. Straight to the point, no victory points, no fuss, just a target.
Naturally, actually doing that is considerably more complicated.
Between you and that tower are enemy Champions, minions, control points, and, perhaps more specifically, another player trying to do exactly the same thing to you.
This creates the basic rhythm of Trials of Maya. Push forward, establish control, develop your Champion, deploy minions, and look for the opening that lets you finally crack the enemy defenses and take down that tower.
Structurally, it feels remarkably like a MOBA, though the entire game operates on a single battle lane and definitely feels more focused, less broad. This doesn’t take anything away from the feeling that this is, in fact, a MOBA. Instead, it streamlines it a great deal to function as a board game. It’s just a good design philosophy when making board games: get to the heart of it as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Minions, a key resource in the game for both players, begin the game neutral and must first be defeated before they become available as allies you control. This gives the game the feeling of that early MOBA strategy where initially you’re not just charging into a team fight straight out of the gate. You need to build up your strength first.
In our first game, our instinct was to rush into battle and start fighting, but from a strategy stand point their is more finesse required. The first few rounds you really want to build up your strength, get your tableau organized in a planned way, and collect some minions before trying to tower dive and win the game. Engaging the enemy prematurely can be very costly.
As you damage enemy minions, you collect health chips that are used when you deploy allied versions of your minions. More health means they can stay in the fight longer. Just one of several ways you can power up your advantage.
Meanwhile, neutral spawn and purchase points scattered around the battlefield can be captured, allowing your forces to return closer to the action rather than marching all the way from your base when they respawn. Along the way you can complete objectives drawn as cards each round to collect experience points so that you can upgrade your champion.
Experience points can be used to upgrade abilities, skills, and increase health and energy generation. The faster and more efficiently you can complete these objectives, the bigger edge in the match you can garner.
There are several ways you can upgrade your champions during play, but I don’t think this is something you can sort of pre-plan. The circumstances of the battle will determine what you need at any given moment, so it feels very dynamic and responsive. You’re definitely not going to do it the same way each game.
The result is a battlefield increasingly defined by positioning and points of strength. Where you fight matters as much as how and when you fight.
It all works, but the real star of Trials of Maya is, as already mentioned, unquestionably the Champions.
Champions and Cards
I said it in my overview, and I’ll say it again here: this game is about the Champions. As it should be!
Each has a very clear identity built around their statistics, skills, and abilities. You could easily slap familiar MOBA labels on them. Tank, mage, sniper, and so on.
But anyone who has spent enough time playing MOBAs knows those labels are really just starting points.
The fun begins when players start messing with their builds.
Every Champion has a customizable deck that lets you refine, exaggerate, and sometimes bend their intended role. Kshar, for example, is essentially a fast-moving mage, but the right cards can make him considerably more supportive. Equip him differently and he can become far more durable than his basic statistics would suggest.
That’s important because experimenting with builds is a huge part of what makes MOBAs so addictive. Someone discovers a combination. Everyone complains that it’s broken. Someone else figures out how to counter it. Suddenly your group has developed its own little meta.
Trials of Maya gets this. In fact, this might be the single most convincing part of the entire design.
The cards themselves are fantastic. There are attacks, spells, reactions, defensive abilities, utility effects, and Relics that function essentially as equipment. Some reinforce what a Champion already does well, while others allow you to push them in unexpected directions.
Deck construction rules are very reminiscent of a collectable card game; I think most players will agree that you are going to want to have a large pool of cards to maximize your flexibility before the game when constructing decks. This is where that FOMO is really going to kick in; just knowing something exists that you don’t have is going to feel frustrating. The truth, however, is that the base game comes with lots of options to explore.
More importantly, the way those cards enter play creates one of the game’s smartest systems.
Cards are placed into a tableau representing the abilities currently available to your Champion. As new cards enter, existing cards move through the tableau until eventually dropping off the end. When they do, they generate energy.
That creates a wonderfully nasty little dilemma.
You want powerful cards in your tableau because those are the abilities you can actually use. But you also need cards moving through it with good energy values because energy is what allows you to do anything in the first place.
Better yet, finding combinations of cards and getting them to the table at the right time has this awesome delayed pay-off effect, the feeling of a cool strategy coming together.
A card played now might not become energy for several rounds, which means you’re constantly balancing what you need your Champion to do now against what you’re going to need several turns from now.
That’s good stuff, resource management as such is a key tactical consideration for just about everything you do.
Most of this information is also visible to your opponent. I can see your tableau, your energy, and what you’re positioned to generate next round. I might not know exactly what’s sitting in your hand, but I can make a pretty educated assessment of what you’re capable of doing on any given round. This opens the game to clever timing and concentrated strikes that feel tight and responsive to the action on the table. The game isn’t about just splashing everything you’ve got every round; you’re looking for good opportunities.
Trials of Maya is a very deterministic system; there is very little hidden information and no random die rolls or other randomized elements. You have clean visibility of your opponents’ status and the state of the board. You know exactly what you’re working with at any given moment; the only real surprises are the hidden cards a player may spring on you from their hand.
Trials of Maya isn’t asking you to bluff your way through a chaotic card game. It’s asking you to study the battlefield, calculate possibilities, and prepare several turns ahead.
When all of these systems come together, Trials of Maya can be fantastic.
Unfortunately, getting them to come together consistently is also where I ran into my biggest challenge with the game.
The Great Maya Stalemate
I mentioned in my preview that Trials of Maya seemed to have a pacing problem, though I want to rephrase that and say… sometimes. It sometimes has a pacing problem.
After repeated plays, how often and why this happens can vary wildly, and it’s not really something you can always control or identify the exact cause.
What tended to happen in our games was that a front formed somewhere near the middle of the battlefield. Minions respawn quickly, movement is limited, often hampered by opposition, and the map is relatively tight, so eventually both sides crash into each other, and everything grinds to a halt.
You kill my minions. I kill yours. You kill my champion, I kill yours. They come back. We do it again.
There were games where this began to feel like World War I trench warfare. The front moved slightly forward, then slightly backward, bodies piled up everywhere, and yet somehow the actual strategic situation remained almost exactly the same round after round.
The problem isn’t that nothing is happening. Plenty is happening. The problem is that nothing is progressing for extended periods, often spanning many rounds of play.
Video game MOBAs have stalemates too, but there you’re still dodging attacks, firing abilities, farming minions, and constantly repositioning. There is activity even when there is no progress because it’s an action game and you’re smashing buttons like a maniac. Not really so, in a tabletop strategy game
That distinction matters on the tabletop.
In Trials of Maya, an attrition battle can consume four or five or more rounds or, in some of our games, a significant portion of the entire match. Eventually someone cracks the line, and suddenly the game comes alive. Champions break through, big abilities start firing, towers become vulnerable, defenses are hastily put together, and everything begins tumbling toward a conclusion.
Those breakthrough moments are fantastic, and it’s genuinely exciting. It’s where you want to be all the time, and it’s for those moments that you are going to pull this game out. The stalemates can and often are quite dull and repetitive.
This remained true for us across repeated plays, including with four players.
I’ll concede that there may be some deeper tactical answer we simply haven’t discovered; despite my best efforts to play as many games as I could squeeze in, I don’t think even at this point that I’m particularly efficient with it. That’s a good thing, mind you; it means there is more to discover and I still have the urge to bring it out and play.
Maybe experienced Trials of Maya players will eventually learn how to dismantle these situations more effectively.
I’ve been playing games for a few decades, though, and I like to think I’m reasonably clever. If there’s an obvious answer buried somewhere in the system, I couldn’t find it.
The Rhythm of the Game
Ultimately, I had a lot of fun playing Trials of Maya, but it’s important to understand what kind of fun we’re talking about, and I think this is the key to the whole review. It speaks to who this game is for.
This isn’t an explosive action game, nor is this a game you play once and put away. It’s meant to be studied; it’s meant to be replayed, and most importantly, it’s designed with the assumption that you are going to make this a staple of your regular gaming. You’re going to get into it.
I played Aristeia by Corvus Belli late last year, not exactly a MOBA, but it was a battle arena game that shared a lot of DNA with the genre. The most notable thing about that game is that you had this great moderate depth in strategy, but it was also action-packed. In a 3-hour game session, you would easily play 3-4 games, and that gives you an opportunity to try different heroes and different hero builds. It felt quite right.
It’s not that the game is slow, but it’s cerebral and deeply tactical with occasional explosive action sprinkled in. You’re studying the battlefield, managing resources, developing your Champion, and trying to engineer a breakthrough several turns before it actually happens. Not to be confused with “complex”, because while the rules are robust, this is a medium-weight game, but there is a lot to unpack strategically.
Our games generally ran around two and a half to three hours for a short game and considerably longer most of the time. Experience with the game didn’t necessarily make them shorter. As we became better at defending ourselves and understood the systems more clearly, stalemates could actually become harder to break and last a lot longer.
I think if I had one wish for Trials of Maya, it would be that the game was a bit faster and a bit shorter.
Give me a 45 to 60 minute version of this where we finish a match, complain about each other’s ridiculous Champion builds, tweak our decks, reset the battlefield, and immediately go again.
That’s the Trials of Maya I think would shine much, much brighter.
Because the deck construction, Champion development, and counterplay practically beg for repeated matches. I want our group developing a meta. I want someone discovering an obnoxious build that dominates games until the rest of us figure out how to dismantle it.
The current gameplay has a lot of heart, and it’s genuinely good, but I can honestly say that after a three-hour match, nobody was shouting “Again!”
We were putting the game away, not unhappy with our experience, but certainly exhausted by it.
That’s probably my biggest reservation about Trials of Maya.
I really like this game. In fact, I enjoyed the prototype enough that I’m planning to back the crowdfunding campaign when it launches, which probably says more about my feelings than any score I eventually slap on the end of this review.
But Trials of Maya isn’t currently a “Let’s play a round” kind of game.
It’s a “Next Tuesday we’re playing Trials of Maya” kind of game. You need to plan a session, and you know going into it, it’s probably just going to be the one match.
Board gamers know the difference.
There’s a fantastic tactical game here. The Champions work. The cards work. The customization works. Most importantly, Trials of Maya understands why people become obsessed with MOBAs in the first place.
I just want the pacing to catch up.
Make the breakthroughs more frequent. Let the Champions explode onto the battlefield more often. Reduce the time spent grinding against an immovable wall of minions and get us back to those moments when someone pulls off a ridiculous combination, and everyone around the table starts shouting.
Because when a Trials of Maya match breaks out and lets its Champions loose, it really is fantastic.
Replayability and Longevity
Score: Tilt:
Pros: For fans of the MOBA genre, the customizable champions and uniquely familiar tactics are going to keep you glued to your seat for hours.
Cons: The game length and pacing are going to be a problem for the impatient.
I’m going to keep this section relatively short because I think the situation is pretty straightforward.
From a pure content and customization perspective, Trials of Maya has tremendous replayability. Between Champion builds, deck construction, different card combinations, and the inevitable strategies and counter strategies that develop between players, there is an enormous amount to explore.
Throw expansions and additional Champions into the mix, and I could easily imagine Trials of Maya becoming a lifestyle game for the right group.
The problem isn’t whether there’s enough game here. It’s whether you’re going to get it to the table enough to discover it.
With a single match potentially consuming most of an evening, Trials of Maya asks for a considerable investment before you move beyond simply learning the game and start truly experimenting with it. It took me many hours and several sessions before I felt like I understood the game well enough to properly assess it.
That’s simultaneously one of its greatest strengths and biggest weaknesses.
There is a lot here. Getting to it takes time.
Perhaps the best comparison I can make is that Trials of Maya is to tabletop MOBAs what Twilight Imperium is to science fiction civilization-building games.
If you play Twilight Imperium once every couple of years, it’s an enormous, complicated game that consumes an entire day. But get a dedicated group together that plays regularly, learns its factions, understands its politics, and develops grudges and strategies between sessions, and it becomes something else entirely. The commitment isn’t an unfortunate side effect of the experience.
The commitment is the main part of the experience.
Twilight Imperium I think, is a great representation in terms of the sort of gaming group you need in order to really get everything out of the design. When you have a dedicated group, TI4 is one of the most amazing gaming experiences you will ever have. The reality however, is that, while I’m aware of this, the fact that I don’t have such a group means we basically never play it. You really need that buy-in, and that might not be so easy. I think Trials of Maya may suffer from that same issue, which doesn’t say anything negative about its quality; it’s just a reality of the sort of game it is.
I think Trials of Maya has some of that same DNA.
Get four players invested in their Champions, tinkering with decks between games, developing strategies, countering each other’s builds, and creating their own little meta, and I think there’s enough depth here for a group to really sink its teeth into and have an amazing experience.
Play it occasionally with different people, and I’m not convinced you’ll ever reach the good stuff.
That’s the strange contradiction at the heart of Trials of Maya’s longevity. Mechanically, its replayability is enormous. Practically, accessing that replayability requires considerably more commitment than most games ask of you.
For the right group, that’s potentially golden. For everyone else, Trials of Maya may simply ask for more time than they’re willing to give it.
Conclusion
Man, I’m happy to finally reach the end of this review. This one took some work.
After all the playing, analyzing, rewriting, second-guessing, and arguing with myself, however, I think there’s really only one thing you need to know about my experience with Trials of Maya.
I’ve already picked out a permanent spot for it on my shelf.
When the finished game arrives, I’m going back in.
Trials of Maya is, to me, an expression of everything I love about this hobby. It’s creative, unusual, ambitious, surprising, and clearly made by people who genuinely love games.
Is it perfect? Absolutely not. I think the pacing needs work, matches run longer than I’d like, and accessing the game’s considerable depth requires a level of commitment that won’t suit every group.
But when Trials of Maya clicks, it really clicks.
If you’re both a MOBA fan and a board gamer, like me, this is an easy recommendation. Trials of Maya understands the genre in a way few tabletop adaptations I’ve played ever have. The Champions, deck building, progression, positioning, and constant search for combinations and counters capture that wonderful MOBA obsession with builds, tactics, and experimentation.
I’ve played quite a few attempts at bringing the MOBA experience to the tabletop over the years. Trials of Maya is one of the best I’ve encountered.
The harder question is how far it can reach beyond that admittedly niche audience. I’m less certain there. It’s a big game asking for a big commitment, built around a very specific style of tactical play. That’s going to make it a tougher sell for some groups.
But maybe that’s okay.
Trials of Maya knows what it wants to be. More importantly, it has the courage to actually be it. It’s worth noting as well that you can play this game with only a single partner, so you don’t need a large group of dedicated players to have a good time with it.
I started this review talking about the difficulty of separating my sympathy for a passion project from my responsibility to actually judge the game sitting in front of me.
Well, I’ve judged it. It earned the spot on my shelf. It’s an epic box.
(4.50 out of 5) Awesome Game!
