Trials of Maya. Learn in 15 Minutes. A Board Game Quick Tutorial.
Transcript
Enter Maya's endless simulations where you'll battle across shifting arenas in Trials of Maya.
And today we're diving into a quick start tutorial of Trials of Maya. We'll explain everything you need to know if you want to get started quickly and pick up the details and icons as you go along in 15 minutes or less. And we'll link to the project page in the description.
And hi everyone, it's Stella.
And Tarrant, welcome to Maple University.
And hey, if you enjoy this video after watching, like, subscribe, and comment. You know what to do. Now, let's get to the classroom.
In Trials of Maya, players are champions in the land of Naay, living under the super sentient Maya network. To Maya, the players are mere pawns and data points. And in the game, Maya forces the players into different arena combats in pursuit of its own knowledge and understanding. But for you as the champions, it matters not why you're fighting, the victory is still just as sweet. Trials of Maya is based on the forthcoming novel Maya Seed Takes Root, written by Trials of Maya's designers Anan Gandhi and Zain Memon.
As this book introduces you to the world of Maya, let's now learn about the game.
There are several modes of play, and for this video, I'll be focusing on the siege modes, which play one versus one on this map or two versus two on this one. There is a free-for-all head hunters mode with the same core rules, but some different map and scenario rules which I won't cover in this video. Each player has a tower, both starting with 12 or 16 hit points depending on your chosen length of game. You win by destroying all enemy towers. You each command a champion which begins off the map. Your champion has a player board with tracks for health, defense, and energy, each of which has a plus 10 side, and a starting health value.
This is also your current maximum value for both health and defense. You have a deck of cards, either pre-built for your champion, or built using the game's deck construction rules. Separate to the player decks is a common deck of basic memory fragments, from which each player draws three starting cards. The rest of your board has three passive abilities available immediately, and several upgradeables, which begin inactive. These tokens are minions. They are nominally neutral fighters who might join your side. Depending on the mode of play, you may even already have one as an ally waiting to be deployed. Scenario setup will start some neutral minions on the map, each with a given stack of hit points.
These plungers are spawn points. They could be in a team's color, or they could be neutral. While ones with this ring are upgrade points. In some scenarios, a single point may serve both functions. This is the objective mat, and objectives are how you gain XP to upgrade your champion. To begin, there will be two starter objectives, and others from the deck, for a total of four objectives in a two-player game, or five objectives with more. Finally, this is the initiative track, which sets turn order. For now, arrange players only on the tiebreaker track, not initiative. You're ready to play.
Trials of Maya plays in rounds, in which players will take actions to move, battle, and take control of the arena.
Each of these rounds takes place in phases, and I'll take you through the sequence of phases now. First is refresh. Discard any scored objectives, except for starters which get flipped the first time they're scored, and refill. All players draw up to their hand limit if they're below, shuffling discards to form a new draw deck if necessary, and set all tableau cards to deactivated. Second is slide. Players slide all their cards to the right, and for the ones which are discarded, players gain energy based on what's in the lower right, and resolve on exit effects in initiative order if there are any.
Then each player secretly picks an action card from hand, or if they wish, the top memory fragment from its deck to fill the newly empty slot. Third is initiative. All players reveal their new action cards, and based on the energies in everyone's lower right corners, set the initiative order with highest energy being lowest in initiative. Any ties are broken by the tiebreak track with the tiebreak winner pushing to the back of the queue. Nobody gains this energy, it's just used to set initiative. In the new order, resolve on arrival effects on the new cards if any. Fourth is player turns.
Each player takes one turn in initiative order, following all of these steps in order before the next player. First respawn. If your champion is off the map, return it to an empty space as close to one of your spawn points as possible. Second is allied minion actions. If there are any minions with your colored rings on the map, they activate by taking all of the actions on their head chips in any order. Completely finish with one minion before starting another if you have more than one. Third, resolve any start of turn effects in your tableau. Fourth is the action phase. Take any number of actions with your champion, most of which will come from spending energy to activate the action cards in your tableau.
I'll talk more about the action phase in the next section. Fifth, resolve any end of turn effects in your tableau. And sixth, discard any number of unwanted cards from hand. Then, before the next player's turn, any neutral minion which you damaged during your turn, or to which you or one of your allied minions is now adjacent, is now aggro. The next enemy player clockwise from you activates all aggro minions, resolving the actions printed on their heads, and attempting to attack your champion, or failing that, your allied minions. Once each player has taken a turn to follow these steps and trigger aggro minion attacks, the round is over.
The core of the game is in the player's actions.
This is where you'll do the majority of your battling.
In your action phase, take as many actions as you want and can afford. You may activate a deactivated card. Pay the energy cost in its top left and slide the card up. Now, take any number of that card's actions in any order, and broken up by other actions if you wish, except that once you activate another card, any unused actions on the earlier card are lost. Some card actions and modifiers appear in text, but most come from these six icons. There is move, up to this number of spaces. You cannot move through walls, voids, or enemy or neutral entities.
Through friendly entities is fine as long as you do not finish on them. You may draw the indicated number of cards into hand. You may increase your defense track using the blue marker, but going no higher than your current max defense. You could pull another entity from up to that many empty spaces away in a straight line to the space adjacent to you. You could push another entity up to that many spaces starting from an adjacent space and in a straight line. For enemies and neutrals, if it collides with something, then it stops and loses one health for each step not moved, while the obstacle, if it has health, also suffers that damage.
And there's attack, either basic to an adjacent enemy or in one of several special patterns. Deal the damage in the large circle to the target plus one if you're at higher elevation than the target. When attacking a champion, each damage deducts a defense point if available or hit point if not. For a minion, take one of its hit point chips for each damage and add it to your bank. Some of the other attack patterns and their restrictions are shown on the player aid. Most of these actions evaluate at a numerical strength. However, some will combo with a trait icon. Here, it's a projectile attack at range two with strength based on total number of fleet shot icons in the tableau.
Cards may have one, two, or a shattered trait which counts as zero. So, this would be at a strength of three. Other combos might count the number of unique traits in your tableau. Most of your actions will come from activating these cards.
But, there are some other tricks up your sleeves to win the Trials of Maya.
You may play a spell from hand. Pay its energy cost, resolve its effect, and discard it immediately. For reaction spell, you may play this only out of turn in response to a trigger. You may equip a relic from hand. Pay its energy cost and put it into any one of the action card slots. From now on, when you activate that slot's action card, treat the effects on the relic as if they also belong to that card. Actions will slide each round, but relics will not. You may use a champion's active skill or ability. These might be actions or they might modify actions.
You may gain experience. If based on the actions in your actions phase only, you meet an objective market and gain its experience points. Or gain only one point if you weren't the first to mark it. You may do this at most once per turn. Finally, if you're adjacent to an upgrade point, you may upgrade. Choose one, pay its cost, and then flip or rotate it. In the case of max health, also gain the difference between the two health values. A key part of your battle will be swaying minions to fight as allies on your side. When you damage a neutral or enemy minion, you take its hit points to your bank.
And when you land the final blow, you also get to take its head. At any time during your turn, you may spawn a friendly minion by putting a head you've collected on top of any number of banked hit points and spawning next to one of your spawn points. You may activate each once per turn, but only between respawn and start of turn. There are different terrains on the map, some of which have effects and some of which don't, and any connected group of matching hexes is called a zone, with this definition relevant to some effects. Some attacks deal status tokens. Common ones are root, each of which cancels one movement step before being discarded, and bleed, for which every time you activate a card, you suffer a damage.
Other unique statuses apply to specific champions. Read your champion's abilities and strategy tips carefully as these will drive your style of play. In the siege, all spawn points are contestable, and at the end of the round, you claim any spawn point where your team has strictly more entities on its adjacent spaces than the enemy or the neutrals. In the two versus two game, teammates act in the same interest, but they keep all of their resources, actions, and effects separate with one exception. When they damage minions, any hit points they take go to a shared hit point bank. There is also never friendly fire. Your actions cannot attack your teammates, nor any of your allied minions.
In a siege scenario, your aim is to destroy the enemy tower.
Watch it crumble away before your eyes.
Each player in the siege mode has their own tower, and it can attack. After your turn, deal three damage to the nearest enemy within the tower's zone. Meanwhile, the towers can lose health in two ways. The first is by a conventional attack. This follows all of the standard attack rules and results in the tower losing hit points. These are out of the game. They are not banked. Secondly, when a champion loses all health, it dies and is removed from the board. The player gains a death token, and their tower loses one hit point for every death token now held, making each death worse than the last.
The champion will respawn with full health in that player's next respawn step, keeping everything on your board except for negative statuses and relics. In the siege, the first player or team to destroy all opposing towers is the winner.