Trials of Maya: Command Maya's Legends
Transcript
Trials of Maya is sitting here on the table. This is the first game from a Department of Lore. It is a MOA inspired battle game with more modes than we can even possibly describe to you right now. We've played one mode here in this prototype that's sitting in front of us. Uh definitely MOA inspired. It's going to give you some of those vibes or at least as much as a tabletop game, I think, can. Uh, and we're going to tell you as much as we can about it, and I'm going to even quiz Ryan on some of the other modes that are involved.
Well, mobile inspired, TCGLLCG inspired. It's an expandable system. Uh, there is some deck building elements to the game. We're going to primarily talk about what comes in this core box because this is it's a MOA. It's a hero battler. Each player is going to play one of these characters. And I'll note these characters are all from what they're calling like the Maya narrative universe. Yes, they're doing books, comics, maybe even like a a movie they've teased.
They have plans for they've put a lot of effort into creating this universe and I think they have a lot of ambitious plans for all the things all sorts of different media around this, but this is the first tabletop initiative anyway,
right? And these these characters are are from that. Now, the the highlight of this game, what what makes this game maybe some different from other MOBAs or other arena battlers is the playerboards. and we'll talk about that in a little bit more uh detail, but the playerboards are built with two sections. And one of those sections is just your character. And it comes with this little foldable thing here that's going to kind of tell you about your character, tell you the different race and class classes that you uh are made up of. Um, and those are going to be kind of the the restrictions that you use when building your deck because like a lot of these expandable games, you can come into it by building your own deck. There's a ton of cards that they include. And this is just a prototype. Like we said, we don't have access to all the content, but we have a ton of cards that we could have used to kind of build our own decks for our characters.
We opted instead to use the um pre-made decks because we figured they're smarter than we are.
Definitely smarter than I am. Pre-made ones.
I appreciate that. I think there's a lot of people out there who love the idea of building their own decks. I know a lot of people in my family included. Me personally, give me a deck and I will do with it what I can. Well, I like I like the idea that each each one of these characters comes with three passive abilities. Some of those passive abilities are going to actually bring in other unique components into the game as well. And then you're kind of deck building around that. So, the pre-made decks are already built to kind of into the strengths of your specific character. They even have a little section on your playerboard that kind of talks to you about like here's some strategy tips. Here's how to play this character if you're new to the game or new to this style of game. And it's going to kind of feature a guideline. So, that's an important part about the playerboard. It's also worth noting that the player board is fully upgradable.
You're going to have all these sections of the board. You're going to start with some skills that you can upgrade over the game. You're going to start with some health values, defense values, energy values that can all be upgraded throughout the game. And you're going to have these slots in your playerboard where you can add these relics that are in your deck. So everything as you kind of play through is very customizable. And you're kind of creating when you're building the deck, you're kind of focusing on maybe some of these things or when you're using the pre-built deck, you're kind of upgrading throughout the game in a way that makes sense for the gameplay.
Yeah. And I think a lot of the things that Ryan just mentioned is what sets this one apart from a lot of other at least arena battlers that are a little bit more straightforward. Uh this has a lot going on. All of those upgrades, all those skills, you're going to be gaining experience through objectives and spending them on these things, making a lot of decisions as you play the game. And again, that's just this mode of the game that we're talking about. Some of the other modes sound like they're maybe even a little bit more ambitious as it relates to all the things that are going on. But it's all built around an interesting card play system as well, which is another thing you're going to be doing on your board is playing your cards. And that system in and of itself has a layer of strategy because there's timing involved. You have these three cards and at the end of each round, one of those is going to slide off, the other two slide down, and then the beginning of the next round, you add a card, but you have those three cards that kind of define your round of what you can do, at least as it relates to your cards, because there's always other things you can do as well. Um, so balancing the strategy or balancing all of these different factors that go into the strategy is quite a bit. I mean, it is it is a lot like like building that action card row. There's there's three types of cards in the game. There's there's action cards, there's spells, and there's relics. Relics are what you tuck under your board to kind of make those activated cards better. And then spells are kind of one and done. You play them, they go to your discard pile, they have an effect. But the meat of the game is these action cards. Everything that you'd expect to do in a MOA game.
You're moving, you're attacking, you're pushing, you're pulling, you're doing other status effects on players like poisoning them or whatever. All of that is done through these action cards. Every action card is going to have a number of actions on it and an energy cost to activate that card. As you're playing these cards and as they're slowing down your tableau, you're constantly changing what actions you have available to you. Because whatever actions are present on those three cards are what you can do. If you don't have a card in front of you that has an attack, like you've played three cards in a row and you get to a point where you don't have an attack option across your three cards, you're not attacking that right. So, you really need to plan ahead. And maybe that's okay. Maybe you, you know, you have a attack card in your hand that you're waiting for because the other thing that happens as these cards slide off is they give you energy. Every single one of these cards has an energy value that it costs to use the card on your turn, but it also has an energy value down in the corner. When it falls off, you get that energy for the next round. So, you might have a card you're like, "Okay, well, this card gives me eight energy. Maybe I want to play that very early in the game so I get to that eight energy like soon." But, you know, if you end up in a situation where that card falls off, you have eight energy and you don't have any real good cards to use it, you've kind of wasted that eight energy for that turn. So, it really is planning that that tableau is a huge part of what makes this game different, I think.
Yeah. And speaking of that energy that you get back, too, that can range quite a bit. There are cards that give you six back, and I think there's some that all the way down to three.
Yeah. Or I have one that eight, like I mentioned. Yeah.
Eight.
Yeah.
Yeah. And some of the upgrades you can get, like we alluded to earlier, you can spend some of the experience you get to increase that. So you get plus one or plus two or plus three, which is going to be significantly helpful. I mean, imagine getting eight plus
Oh, I know. Plus another plus two. Now there is a cap to that because all of our uh values have a cap, but that too is something you can upgrade in a lot.
Yeah, you can upgrade your Yeah, there's a ton of upgrades on your board. um tons of things that can be upgraded and and that upgrade system is kind of key to this game because no matter what game mode you're playing, you're going to be playing with objectives out and there's going to be some objectives that maybe specifically start out based on the scenario. There's going to be some that are random objectives sit out in front of you and on your turn if you've completed one, you can complete one objective a turn a round. So if you have met the requirements, you can do it and gain the XP and that is the primary way that you're getting XP. And it's worth noting that these objectives are not always do damage and kill things. There's one out there that we have that just requires you to move a lot. There's one that wants you to end next to some enemies. So, it's not always about just fight. You want to actually try to complete these objectives because you need that XP. If one player is completing a lot of objectives and getting a lot of XP, they're upgrading their character a lot more. They're getting higher stats. They're getting better values. They're upgrading their skills. You start with three skills you can unlock and they can go all the way up to a level two skill, which is like a very strong version of that. So, the earlier you can get those skills unlocked, the more you're going to be able to lean into your character strengths.
Yeah. And aside from a lot of the things you can upgrade, these passive abilities, too, are things that really add to the flavor of your character. All the characters have a very different sort of feel and vibe to them. My guy, for instance, uh once I figured it out a little bit, uh could build at the start of my turn, I could place one of these tokens down in my space. At first, I thought this was a good token. It is a good token, but not for you or me to be on. This is a low ground token effectively. There's high ground and low ground, at least on this map. Uh and that affects the damage that you might do.
Long story short, you want the high ground like you always do.
Sure. Uh, this creates a low ground thing, but a lot of my cards also did a lot of pulling. So, I was able to effectively move take one of these, put on the board, move off of it, and then maybe pull someone onto it, effectively giving me the high ground, which was a little bit more layered than I thought at first, but an interesting thing that kind of helped define the character
because you have that push and pull mechanic. You can place the high ground, push someone into the high ground or low ground, deal extra damage. Um, my character flies. A lot of my abilities have to do with flying. If I'm ever alone, I can take flight up into the sky and a lot of my abilities become better while I'm flying, which is pretty cool for a winged character. But I want to talk about what you're doing on your turn, but also how it relates to the game mode you're playing. There are a few game modes. We have one set up here that's called Siege. It's a 1v one, and there is a whole book, uh, and I have a limited version of this book because of we just have a little prototype here, but we're playing a siege game mode. The book is going to tell you literally how to set it up. You're going to have different spawn points. You're going to have different objectives in this siege. we're trying to destroy each other's castles or or towers.
And then you're going to have a bunch of these poles on the ground that represent your spawn points and your upgrade points. Spawn points are where you and your minions spawn. And upgrades uh points are where you can go to upgrade. You've kind of got one on each side that's yours. It's a spawn point and an upgrade point. You can always return there to cash in your XP for upgrades. Or there's some out on the board. If you control the spawn point, you kind of get a forward spawn for your minions. And if you're over here next to this upgrade post, you can upgrade even mid battle. But I do want to talk about this whole minion thing because I think this is another really interesting way that the game um handles minions. You're going to start out with maybe some minions in your control, but they don't have any health. You you can't just spawn them at the start of the game. And then there's going to be a bunch of minions placed out on the board. Anytime you see these stacks of health tokens, that's how much health that these minions have. Whenever you deal damage to these minions, you actually collect whatever damage. If you do three damage, you take three of their health tokens, you add it to a pool, you can use those tokens to then summon and spawn your own minions with health from that pool. So, you're kind of deciding if you want to split it up amongst multiple minions or just have one giant minion that has a ton of health.
Yeah. And you start, at least the mode we played, we started with one, but you can acquire those minions that are out on the board once you take them all the way down, too. So you have a variety of minions that you can then use going forward to help you get everything done.
Yeah. And they have their own abilities. They have their own attacks, their own damage, their own, you know, special things they might do. Um, so a big part of that game is controlling those minions because it's it's interesting. If I can take a minion, if I do the final blow, I get their little token and I can then summon them out. But then if David kills this guy, he gets this token. But these the the health values are constantly moving back and forth between our pools. If I'm damaging David's minions, I'm taking his health. If he's damaging mine, he's taking my health. But if minions fight each other, those health tokens are removed from the game. So, we're actually if we're sending our minions to fight, we're actually just lowering the total amount of health that is even in in the pool of the game, which I think is an interesting way to to handle that.
Yeah, that's just one more thing that kind I really do think that sets it apart. There's a lot of things to consider there because that's not even what Ryan just said. I hadn't even considered while we were playing in terms of like the health going out of the game and overall reducing the amount of health out there to play with because
you do you gather that health and if you have a minion there's a phase where you can like summon that minion and you're like do I want to bring this guy out now I have four health tokens he's going in pretty light
um or do I wait gather a little bit more health and put him out there in a little beefier position.
Yeah, like some of these minions start with like 12 health out of the board. So they they could it could take a minute a minute or two to to chip away at them. But deciding when to fight minions, you have to deal all that damage. You have to completely kill like be the one that deals the final blow to claim the minion to put it out. So if David's fighting a minion, I'm probably just going to let him. Maybe I'm even going to help the minion and just fight David. Um because there is, you know, it is a PvP game. You're moving around this arena. You're making tactical decisions. You've got terrain. You've got walls. you've got in excess of like all the stuff that goes into, you know, what you would expect in a uh terrainbased game. But the goal is maybe to fight the opponent. We want to destroy these towers. You can do a little extra damage to these towers in this mode. Every time you knock out the opponent, it does some damage. So, it's not necessarily about just killing your your opponent. If you do defeat their champion, they get to come back the next round. So, you you stay in the game.
It's not like a player elimination kind of thing. Even in a four-player game, if your guy gets knocked out, he comes right back in.
Yeah, it's not about killing them, but I do like the fact that knocking them out keeps the game moving forward on the bases, at least in this mode. Another thing back on the cards that we didn't talk about, there are these traits. There's these symbols, and a lot of the cards will potentially be more powerful based on the number of traits you have active. And a lot of the cards have those traits on themselves. Some of the cards have those traits in the upper corner, but they're kind of like broken. that is based that's built for deck building. Oh yeah, deck.
So it kind of tells you what kind of traits you can have, but the ones that are broken don't count. But on your player board, there are also these trait tokens that yet another thing that you can spend experience on where like this one has two different traits if I'm using experience. I could spend two to flip this over. Now I have two more traits that I can use so that it can help power some of those cards.
Yeah. And every character kind of I talked about this in the beginning of the video, but they have traits based on they have uh like their species and then they have two classes. And each one of those classes is linked to a trait. When you put those together, that's how you're going to build your deck. And then when you're kind of upgrading, you can upgrade to get more of those traits because you know some of your cards are going to want them. Or you could upgrade to get traits that aren't inherent in your starting deck because maybe you have some cards that if you're deck building especially like we said we we went into you know this with with the completely start um starter setup which I would do want to take one second to note the packaging on these the way it comes. I want to show you guys.
I love they have these trays and you have you have your miniature in there and then you have space below it for your playerboard like the specific character and then your deck can fit in there. So whether you've done a specific deck build or not, it all fits in these trays
and your components.
And your components, the special tokens, the skill cards, anything that you need to play that character, you kind of put in this box and then that is what you'll actually bring in to the game. But it does come with several of these um pre-made for you, which is a nice little touch. I I liked that.
Yeah, the production value overall is really nice. It has a very elegant look. Um, you can't appreciate this right here, but there's a lot of, at least in our prototype.
A lot of magnets used to build these stands. Yeah.
Big fan of magnets. Um, they even have suction cups on the bottoms of these. Um, and again, this is a prototype. Some of our suction cups aren't sure.
Uh, they're kind of a little wobbly, but they've really thought of a lot of things here to make this work really well. As you're seeing this on the table, there's a lot of high stacked things. Uh, but as we played, nothing's getting knocked over. And
yeah, it was pretty easy to manipulate everything. Um, and like I said, this setup that we have here, this is just one of the setups of the game. This is kind of a onev one siege mode. It's a little bit smaller of a board. They do have
Yeah. What are some of the other modes?
Well, they have uh this is the board for the 2v2 siege mode. This thing is is a beast. That's when you play the team mode. So, a lot more going in. And again, the setup for that is in the book. It's going to show you uh where everything goes to start up. And then another cool mode, um, one that's less PvP oriented is this head hunter mode. And you're actually kind of building out a board. They give you some tiles that you can use to build out your own kind of, uh, orientation.
Get bounties, right?
Uh, yeah. And you're chasing bounties. They're going to be having these minions that have have points attached to them. Uh, so it's not necessarily about fighting each other, although you still can. It's also about chasing down these bounties. So that's another game mode. And they've alluded to, they sent a nice little letter with this that kind of talked me through it. Um, these are just the game modes that we have access to that were ready for the prototype. They are going to introduce a ton of new game modes and they've talked about the fact that this game is going to be expandable. You're going to get new game modes. You're going to get new sets of cards and you might even get like new objectives and who knows what else can come in these future packs. They want to lean into that like LCG or expandable model.
Yeah, they've built a universe for sure and I think they have a lot of plans like we said even beyond tabletop that goes into this, but I'm sure they have a lot on tabletop as well. But this is Trials of Maya. If you have any questions at all about it, please make them in the comments below. We'll get down there and answer whatever we can. Until next time, make sure everyone has fun at the table and we'll see you then.