This weekend a few of my friends and I got together for a two day blowout where we did pretty much nothing but eat, drink and play board games.
As is always the case when this particular group gets together, we had a blast. There was too much food, probably too much alcohol and absolutely too many board games crammed into too little time.
In other words, a pretty damn good weekend.
Of course, we are here to talk about the games.
The cool thing about this particular weekend was that we played almost exclusively new stuff. Games that, for one reason or another, had been sitting on our collective radar but had never actually made it to the table.
So this list is effectively a collection of first impressions. Some good, some bad and, as you will soon discover, some that landed squarely in the great kingdom of “it was fine.”
Here we go!
Star Wars Outer Rim
We kicked things off with Star Wars Outer Rim, a 2019 Fantasy Flight Games release that has picked up some notable accolades over the years, including a Golden Geek nomination for Best Thematic Board Game.
This one has been on my must try list for quite a while, so when it finally hit the table I was genuinely excited to give it a go.
In Outer Rim, each player takes on the role of one of the many rogues, scoundrels and bounty hunters floating around the Star Wars universe. You have characters like Boba Fett, Han Solo and, naturally, one of my all time favorite smugglers, Lando Calrissian, who I immediately snatched up.
Nobody else was getting Lando.
The game itself is a competitive adventure game in which you travel around the Outer Rim delivering cargo, hunting down bounties, taking jobs and trying to avoid, or occasionally confront, patrols belonging to the various major factions. All of this earns you fame, which is effectively the game’s victory point system. Get enough fame before everyone else and you win.
Pretty straightforward stuff.
The production, as you might expect from Fantasy Flight Games, is completely over the top. There are cards everywhere, piles of tokens, character sheets, ships, markers and enough gorgeous Star Wars artwork to wallpaper a small apartment.
Fantasy Flight Games never disappoints when it comes to production values, all of their games look amazing on the table and Outer Rim is no exception.
Visually, the game absolutely delivers.
The gameplay itself is a little harder to pin down.
I would describe it as unique and interesting, but not particularly groundbreaking or deep. In fact, underneath all of the cards, tokens, characters, abilities, and various moving parts is actually a fairly simple game.
It is simple in that wonderfully overcooked Fantasy Flight Games sort of way.
There is a lot going on, but that does not necessarily mean there is a lot going on.
Outer Rim is clearly designed primarily as an entertainment experience rather than some deep strategic puzzle, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of decisions to make and certainly opportunities to play well, but at least in our game, luck played a pretty significant role in determining how things ultimately shook out.
I won, for example, and while I would love to sit here and explain how my brilliant tactical mind and mastery of intergalactic smuggling carried me to victory, the reality is that Lando caught some very fortunate breaks.
Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good.
The game was also a bit too long for what it was. Again, this is something I have come to expect from Fantasy Flight Games. Outer Rim has enough going on to keep you entertained, but not quite enough going on to justify how long it takes to reach the finish line.
That said, I had fun.
I would certainly play it again and I think there are still plenty of characters, ships, jobs and strategies I would be curious to explore. I do suspect, however, that Outer Rim has a relatively short shelf life. This does not strike me as the sort of game you are going to pull out twenty or thirty times and continue discovering new layers.
It’s a fun Star Wars adventure game with great production values, plenty of theme and enough randomness to produce some memorable moments.
It was entertaining. It looked fantastic. I won.
It was… fine.
World Order
Definitely the highlight of the weekend and, judging by the reaction around the table, I suspect not just for me.
World Order comes from the same team that gave us the absolutely fantastic Hegemony, so expectations were pretty damn high going into this one. It did not disappoint.
In fact, I would argue that it exceeded my expectations in just about every way.
In World Order, each player takes control of one of the major powers of our modern world, China, Russia, the United States or the European Union, and then proceeds to do what major powers do best. Compete for influence, manipulate everyone around them and generally make the world a worse place in the name of national interest.
You know, geopolitics.
Mechanically, World Order is effectively a card driven deck builder, but describing it that way really undersells what is going on here. Deck building is the engine that makes the machine run, but wrapped around it is resource management, area control, economic competition, political maneuvering and a mountain of player interaction.
Like Hegemony, World Order blew the doors off almost immediately. Just from the rules explaination, I already knew I was going to love this game. It was everything I hoped it would be and more!
This game is a well of asymmetrical strengths and weaknesses, clever plays and wonderfully vicious gotcha moments.
Like Hegemony, however, the real magic is how perfectly the mechanics capture the theme.
You genuinely feel like you are engaged in this constant geopolitical tug of war where everything you do affects someone else. Every action feels meaningful, every play creates an opportunity for someone to respond and every mistake feels like an opening your opponents can exploit.
It doesn’t take long before this turns into a competitive grudge match.
Exactly as it should.
There are also so many clever little ways World Order tweaks familiar deck-building concepts to fit the game. One of my favorites is incredibly simple. When you purchase a new card, rather than putting it into your discard pile as you would in the overwhelming majority of deck builders, you put it directly on top of your deck.
That sounds like a tiny change. It isn’t.
It means that every card you purchase is effectively a card you are buying for your next turn, essentially planning your next move. You are not just improving your deck at some vague point in the future. You are making a strategic decision about what you are going to be able to do next.
This becomes even more important because World Order is an incredibly tight game. You play six rounds and, in each round, you play just four cards. Do the math.
You effectively get 24 actions in the entire game.
That is not a lot of time to establish global economic and political dominance.
Worse yet, there are only two scoring rounds, which means timing is absolutely everything. You can’t simply build some magnificent engine and assume that eventually it will pay off. Eventually may be too late. You need the right cards, in the right place, at the right moment and you need to understand exactly what everyone else is trying to accomplish while you are doing it.
That creates an enormous amount of tension from surprisingly few actions.
The production also deserves some praise, not because it is extravagant, but because it is incredibly clean. Almost everything you need to understand the current state of the game is right there on the board. Who controls what, where influence is building, where the money is flowing and where the next fight is likely to break out is all immediately visible.
The only truly hidden information is the cards in your opponents’ hands and even that mystery only goes so far.
World Order is a highly deterministic game. Luck exists, naturally, but this is very clearly a game that rewards good planning, good timing and, perhaps most importantly, understanding what the other players at the table are trying to do.
I absolutely loved it. There are games you play once and think, “Yeah, that was pretty good.”
Then there are games where you finish and immediately start thinking about what you would do differently next time.
World Order was very much the latter.
Without question, one of the best games I have played all year.
Meeples and Monsters
Released in 2022, Meeples and Monsters seems to have fallen between the cracks of the board gaming world, which is a little surprising given the caliber of its designer, Ole Steiness.
This is the same guy who gave us sleeper hits like Champions of Midgard, Altay: Dawn of Civilization, another really clever game that seems to have largely fallen through the cracks, and the visually stunning Deep Rock Galactic.
That said, after playing Meeples and Monsters, I kind of get it.
There is quite a bit of Lords of Waterdeep DNA here, but Meeples and Monsters is a considerably simpler worker placement game, lighter and executed with far less flair.
In Meeples and Monsters, you collect and upgrade heroes, whose various strengths and abilities you use to fight monsters and score points. As the game progresses, increasingly powerful monsters appear, eventually leading to final showdowns with end-game bosses. Manage your little army of wooden heroes better than everyone else and, presumably, you walk away with the most points and win the game.
The theme is actually quite fun, built around the gag that your heroes are literally wooden meeples. It is colorful, bright, very easy to learn and there is something inherently satisfying about upgrading your little wooden adventurers and sending them off to murder monsters.
The problem is that there really isn’t a tremendous amount to think about.
Unlike Lords of Waterdeep, where you are constantly weighing different options and trying to figure out how to squeeze the most out of each turn with a fair amount of player interaction, Meeples and Monsters has a tendency to present you with several options where one is very obviously better than the others.
Here are the things I can do. That one is clearly the best. So I do that.
Next.
Upgrading and finding interesting combo’s for your heroes is probably where the game was most interesting; there were certainly many ways to go, but really the game was kind of one-dimensional. If you played it once, you have seen everything your going to see.
The fact that it’s a worker placement game where after you place your workers down you remove them, means that blocking actions isn’t a thing, so there is considerably less interactions if any at all between players.
That is really the issue with the game. It is not that there are no decisions to make, it is that too often the game effectively makes the decision for you and it really doesn’t have much impact on the other players.
The main gimmick is that the heroes you have available for this worker placement game are drawn randomly from your bag. Part of the strategy is building the contents of that bag so that the heroes you draw work together and support whatever strategy you are pursuing.
In theory, that should create an interesting puzzle.
In practice, I think there is just a little too much luck involved in what actually comes out of the bag.
As a result, much of the game felt less like I was deciding what to do and more like I was drawing meeples from a bag to discover what the obvious best move was going to be that turn.
Draw your meeples. Look at the board. Spot the obvious move. Execute it.
Occasionally you might have two choices that are equally appealing and you actually have to stop and think about what you want to do, but those moments were the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time the game felt strangely scripted, despite the fact that the script itself was being randomly generated by whatever came out of your bag.
That is not necessarily terrible. There is something pleasant about the whole experience. You are upgrading heroes, killing monsters, getting stronger and watching increasingly ridiculous creatures appear on the board. The game moves along nicely and there is enough going on to keep everyone engaged.
It just never really challenged me.
Meeples and Monsters was fine, but I can understand why it disappeared under the radar despite having a recognizable designer behind it. This is certainly not Ole Steiness at his best.
I do think there is an audience for it, however.
If you have younger kids who are ready to move beyond basic family games and into proper hobby board games, I could actually see Meeples and Monsters being a pretty great step up. The colorful presentation, fun theme, straightforward decisions and constant sense of progression would probably go a long way with that audience.
For my group? It was fine.
Cascadia: Landmarks
Cascadia was the only game in our lineup that I had actually played before, but this time we added the Landmarks expansion and bumped the game up to five players.
Cascadia is, by just about any reasonable measure, one of the premier board games of 2021. It’s sitting pretty in the 61st spot on the 100 games of all time on BoardGameGeek list as of this writing and has collected awards from just about every place you can collect an award from.
At this point, I think it is fair to call Cascadia a modern classic.
I’m a pretty late bloomer here. I only played it for the first time this year and, apparently, I am considerably less impressed with it than the rest of the board gaming world.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Cascadia is a very clever puzzle game. There are plenty of interesting decisions, it moves at a brisk pace and there is something genuinely satisfying about watching this little ecosystem slowly come together in front of you.
When you pull off exactly what you were trying to do, it feels great.
For me, though, the whole experience is just a bit too benign.
We are all sitting around the same table, supposedly playing a board game together, but really everyone is off in their own little corner playing their own private game of Cascadia. The entire scope of player interaction basically boils down to someone taking the tile or animal you wanted.
You bastard. Then you move on with your life.
It reminds me quite a bit of Wingspan, which falls into a similar category for me. Everyone is technically playing the same game together, but most of the time we could probably erect little privacy screens around our play areas and it wouldn’t dramatically change the experience.
I’m just not a huge fan of games like that.
That said, I completely understand why so many people are.
In Cascadia, the basic premise is that you are placing habitat tiles and populating them with wildlife, trying to arrange everything into particular patterns that score points. Each turn you select a habitat tile and an animal token and add them to the growing puzzle in front of you.
At the end of the game, whoever has done the best job putting all of this together scores the most points and wins.
What keeps the puzzle fresh is that the wildlife scoring conditions change from game to game. You randomly select scoring cards that determine what arrangements of bears, salmon, elk, hawks and foxes you are actually trying to create.
It is simple, elegant and very easy to understand.
The Landmarks expansion adds another layer to that puzzle by rewarding you for building sufficiently large connected habitats. Put together enough of a particular terrain type and you can place a landmark, which gives you access to additional scoring opportunities unique to you.
It is certainly interesting and gives you one more thing to consider while constructing your little wilderness.
I’m just not convinced Cascadia needed it.
The additional ways to score points in the Landmarks expansion is a kind of benign way to approach extra scoring. You sort of did whatever you were going to do anyway for your main scoring and then grabbed things when the opportunity presented itself. I’m sure more advanced players will find better ways to use this expansion, but for me that approach worked fine.
For me, one of the game’s greatest strengths is how clean the original puzzle is. Landmarks adds another decision point and another scoring consideration, but I’m not sure it actually makes the game better. It makes it more complicated, certainly, but those are not the same thing.
I suspect this expansion makes considerably more sense for people who play Cascadia all the time. If you have played the base game twenty or thirty times and know its puzzle inside and out, adding another layer probably gives you exactly the sort of additional complexity and variety you are looking for.
For someone like me, who is going to pull Cascadia out once in a long while, I think I would rather just play the base game.
Ultimately, I walked away with pretty much the same impression I had the first time.
Cascadia is clever, polished, easy to teach and beautifully paced. I completely understand why people love it and I certainly wouldn’t object to playing it again.
It’s simply not the kind of board game that gets me excited. I liked it. It was…
You guessed it.
Fine.
Hamlet: The Village Building Game
The last game on my list is Hamlet: The Village Building Game, which is a clever little puzzly game about, as it says right there on the tin, building a village.
Who says board game names need to be complicated?
This very colorful and incredibly busy game has players collectively constructing a village out of awkwardly shaped tiles, connecting buildings with roads and creating a network through which resources can be transported.
The ultimate goal is to use those resources to construct the central building of the Hamlet, the church. Once completed, your humble little Hamlet officially becomes a Village and the game ends.
Apparently all that separates a Hamlet from a Village is a church. Who knew?
Along the way, everyone scores points for their participation in this increasingly chaotic group construction project, with each player trying to make sure that their contribution to civic development is considerably more valuable than everyone else’s.
Of all the games we played this weekend, I think Hamlet was the only one besides World Order that really got my attention.
There was something going on here.
The village is technically a shared construction project, but everyone is naturally trying to shape that village to benefit themselves. You want roads going where you need them to go, resources available where you can reach them and buildings entering play that support whatever little economic empire you are trying to construct.
The village tiles are oddly shaped; there was no real symmetry to how the village comes together, which creates a lot of weirdness when trying to put different buildings into play. At first I saw this as a drawback, but the result was actually kind of interesting because you really couldn’t make a definitive plan on where you are going to put stuff. You sort of shoved it in where you could.
That creates some surprisingly interesting interaction because when you add something to the village, you are not simply improving your own position. You are changing the board for everyone.
Sometimes that means helping yourself. Sometimes it means accidentally helping someone else.
Sometimes it means putting something somewhere specifically because you know it is going to be a pain in the ass for one of your opponents.
Now we’re playing a board game. There were also clearly layers here that a single play did not fully reveal.
Certain buildings, for example, do not produce resources at all but can score you a considerable number of points. Building them, however, means making sure you can actually get the required resources to the right place. That requires planning your routes, understanding what resources are available and making sure you don’t stretch yourself too thin trying to accomplish everything at once.
There is a surprisingly delicate balance to all of this.
You need to pay close attention to which buildings are available, where resources are being produced and how the growing network of roads connects everything together. It is very easy to get ambitious, overextend yourself and suddenly discover that what looked like a brilliant plan two turns ago now requires you to spend several turns recovering while everyone else happily gets on with scoring points.
I did that. More than once.
That is probably what I liked most about Hamlet. When I made a mistake, it generally felt like my mistake. I could look back at what I had done and see where I had overextended, failed to plan properly or misunderstood how the village was developing.
That immediately makes me want to play again.
I also suspect there is considerably more strategy hiding underneath the colorful presentation than we uncovered during our first game. I came away thinking about different approaches I could take, different ways I could manipulate the village layout and, most importantly, things I would do differently the next time it hits the table.
That is usually a pretty good sign. I liked Hamlet.
It was clever, interactive, pretty to look at and had enough going on beneath the surface that I genuinely want another crack at it.
So after an entire weekend filled with games that were mostly some variation of fine, Hamlet managed to climb a few notches above that.
Not World Order good. But definitely better than fine.
Conclusion
This was a really fun-filled weekend; the truth is that even when games aren’t blowing your mind, it’s hard not to have a good time surrounded by friends.
I will say, however, World Order was the unquestionable king of the hill this weekend. It was a robust, clever, and deeply interactive game that really triggered an unquenchable urge to get it back to the table as soon as possible!
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’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!
