Most attempts at a MOBA board game get the furniture right: lanes, towers, minions, a base to knock down. Trials of MAYA, which launches on Gamefound on September 8, 2026, spends its design effort on the decision instead.
What is Trials of MAYA?
Trials of MAYA is an expandable card-driven arena combat game. It combines three genres: MOBAs, classic 90s tactics games, and TCGs without booster packs. It plays 1 to 4 players in 60 to 180 minutes for ages 14 and up, with nine asymmetric champions across five game modes. Its flagship mode, Siege, uses lanes, towers and minions in 2v2 and 1v1.
The Energy Gambit
In a video game MOBA the tension is tempo. Back off and farm, or force the fight now while your cooldowns are up? You are constantly trading future strength for present initiative.
Trials of MAYA compresses that into one mechanism. Your champion is piloted by a three-slot action mat. At the start of each round the cards slide one space right, and the card falling off pays you energy equal to its energy gain. You commit a card from your hand face down into the emptied leftmost slot, and everyone reveals simultaneously.
That number does two jobs. It sets your initiative this round, where lower acts earlier. And it comes back as energy two rounds later, when the same card finally slides off.
On your turn you spend energy to activate any of the three cards on your mat, taking their actions in whatever order you like. Once you move on to another card you are committed to that choice, so each turn is a sequencing puzzle rather than a checklist. Charging all three costs real energy, which keeps a steady pull between small efficient turns and saving for something bigger.
Player Elimination, writing after multiple plays of a near-final copy, called the game a true MOBA experience and noted that almost the entire mechanical budget sits here. Big Boss Battle described the system as forcing you to think ahead rather than in isolated turns.
The arena is simple on purpose
Energy buys actions: Move, Attack, Defend, Draw, Push and Pull. Attacks come in adjacent, ranged, projectile, piercing and area shapes depending on your champion’s traits.
The terrain vocabulary is short. Walls, spikes, high and low ground, voids. Push and pull can shove a unit into an obstruction for collision damage. None of that is novel on its own, and it does not need to be. It is the standard tactical grid kept tight and readable, giving just enough variety that where you stand is a live question every turn without the map becoming a second rulebook.
Cards carry effects gated by timing windows: On Arrival, On Exit, Start of Turn, End of Turn, Once Per Turn and Passive. Because cards sit on the mat for three rounds, what you played two rounds ago still shapes what you can do now.
Minions you can capture
Most MOBA-style board games treat minions as ambient damage or as farm. Here they are a resource.
Minions are semi-autonomous neutrals with distinct behaviors, represented as stacks of health chips with a character disk on top, so you can read remaining health across the table. Damage one and its HP banks into your pool. Deliver the killing blow, take the head chip, and the minion is yours. You spend from your banked pool to respawn it at whatever health you can afford, and chips stripped from the opposing team’s minions flow into your bank too.
That makes every swing a decision. Take the kill now, or chip a little longer to bank more health first? Deploy several cheap minions, or one durable one? Player Elimination singled this system out as the game’s most impressive concept.
Nine champions with a lot to explore
Asymmetry here runs deeper than different stat lines. Each champion combines passive abilities, stats you upgrade during the match, and a deck built from a card pool gated by its species and two classes.
Dangsa is an agile vaanar tank who jumps across the map and bursts foes down with combos. Mauravi is a garuda who deals damage from across the arena, builds engrams to extend her reach, and enters Flight to strike from above. Prabhakar forces units around the board and gains buffs for well-timed actions inside his Colony. Kshar runs the largest hand in the game and a deep relic arsenal, stacking the Vish debuff on anyone who comes close.
Champions also develop inside a single match. Objectives sit beside the arena and pay XP, with the first champion to complete a non-starter objective taking the full reward and each champion claiming one per round. XP buys max HP, permanent energy income, extra trait symbols and champion skills that branch into one of two second-level versions. Player Elimination summed up the endgame in three words: “late game is nuts.”
Facing a champion teaches you something about how to play around it. Actually learning one takes piloting it yourself, across different builds and upgrade paths, which is where most of the game’s long tail sits.
Deck construction, not deck-building
Worth being precise, because the vocabulary gets muddled. You do not build a deck during play. You construct it beforehand from a fixed, shared pool. Cards must share a trait with your champion or be signature cards naming it. Decks run 24 to 40 cards with at least ten action cards, and every champion ships with a starter deck, which is where reviewers recommend beginning.
Relic cards slot under your action slots to augment them. Spell cards are one-shot effects from hand. There are 340-plus cards in the box and the full list is public before preorder, with no boosters, no random pulls and no crowdfunding-exclusive gameplay cards.
The intent behind all of this is a system rather than a single game: a base that players build their own decks, arenas and game modes on top of.
Against the other tabletop MOBAs
Reviewers have placed it alongside Guards of Atlantis II, Aristeia, Super Fantasy Brawl and ELO Darkness, with Guards as the usual benchmark. Guards is dice-free, refined and scales to larger groups, with mastery coming from learning a wide fixed roster.
Trials of MAYA takes the other road. Player Elimination framed the split as Guards offering a wider cast you meet briefly, against Maya offering a smaller cast you court more intimately, each with many upgrade paths and a lot of detail. Where Guards captures the churn of pushing lanes, Maya puts its strategic focus on capturing minions and building a warband. Adjacent audiences, different games, room for both.
Try it first
There is a Tabletop Simulator build, which is the fastest way to feel a mechanic like the Energy Gambit rather than read about it. Rulebooks and public metadata are on BoardGameGeek, full details on the official page, and preview coverage at Player Elimination, What Board Game and Big Boss Battle.
Follow or back Trials of MAYA on Gamefound.