Check Out Trials Of Maya Crowdfunder (Gamefound)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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…?

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

I say go for it.