Discover the World of Trials of Maya: Tactical Fantasy Game
Transcript
Hello my friends, it's the Game Boy Geek here. Today, we dive into Maya, which is an epic high fantasy universe unfolding over films, games, graphic novels, books, toys, immersive and physical experiences. Today, we're going to be focusing on Trials of Maya, which is a tactical card driven combat game for two to four players, takes one to three hours to play, is for ages 14 and up, and published by the Department of Lore Inc. It's going to be crowdfunded, so let me show you how it works and I'll see you on the other side.
This is a crowdfunding preview, so all the art and components you see here are not final. These are prototypes. To see the most up-to-date art and components, check the link in the description of this video. There's different game modes. Today, I'm going to be focusing on the siege two versus two, which is one team versus another team. It's four players. You could also play a one versus one siege or a hunt head hunters mode. Now, each player is going to get to be what's called a champion, and there are some beautifully sculpted miniatures for these champions. One of them even has two huge wings, uh but the miniatures are beautiful in this. Now, each champion, in addition to having a miniature, also comes with a specific player board. Now, this player board is going to be double-sided. One side actually gives you strategy tips on, you know, how you should play this specific champion. The other side is going to tell you a little bit about its play style, its sort of backstory, uh and the different things it's good or maybe not as good as the others at. Now, in the main game, each champion is also going to get their own deck of cards.
Now, these cards are going to be specific for that champion. However, in advanced play, you can actually construct your own deck of cards based on the different traits and such of your champion and the cards. Now, these cards are the main part of the game because this is a card driven combat game, and these are going to have all different types of abilities and costs and benefits that I'm going to go over later, but here's just a look at some of these. Now, in this siege mode, you are teammates in the two versus two and there's towers. You see that purple tower on top of a bunch of hit points. The other team is trying to destroy your two towers and you're trying to destroy their two towers. The first team to do that wins. Now, here is a player board set all the way up. Now, the game is played over multiple rounds and each round goes through four different phases. I'm not going to go through with all the details of every phase. I'm just going to show you the overall main concepts of the game at a high level.
So, one of the main things you're going to be doing is you're going to be sliding a card off your board and gaining energy for it. Now, everyone's doing this simultaneously. The beginning of the game there's these memory fragment cards or sort of starter cards. Now, this will slide off and it's going to give us five energy. And we'll update that here. Now, this is going to be used to track not only energy, but also defense and health. Energy is a currency that you're going to be using to spend to play cards and such. Now, everyone has their card slid down. Everyone's going to play a card from their hand. You have a certain hand limit depending on your champion and you'll have that drawn up by the time this phase happens. Then everyone's going to simultaneously flip over that card and based on the energy that you had gained when the slides off, you're going to base it on some initiative. So, if you want to go first, you want to have a sort of card that will get you less energy once that pushes off three turns later.
So, as you can imagine in a game with tactical card driven combat, initiative is very important. If it's tied, there is a tiebreaker that helps you facilitate that. Now, keep in mind also, some cards might have exit effects as they're pushed off the board or arrival effects when they're flipped up. There's all sorts of effects in this game. So, then going in initiative initiative order, players are going to take turns. They can do many different things on your turn. Now, first, if you're off the board, if you you know, at the beginning or if you've been killed, you can respawn and you have different spawn points for your team and such and you can spawn there. I'll reference some things that happen also in this phase a little bit later, but then the main part of your phase is the action phase where you can do many different things. Some of them are going to be, you know, activating a card. They all start deactivated. So, if I want to activate this card, I slide it up so it's just activated and I pay the cost. This is going to cost me one energy.
And that's why we use this tracker to keep track of all that. Now, these cards are going to have all different types of actions on there. Some of them will have different modifiers. Like, this is if in flight mode you can draw two cards. Now, this specific champion comes with a token and you can flip it over and be flying and if so, you can get a different uh uh actions and things like I could have drawn two cards, for example. Uh this allows you to, in this case, move two and then attack. Now, a lot of attacks will tell you an exact amount, like attack one. This card has to do with different things that are on your board. Now, different cards will have this specific trait on there. This one has a trait. It's actually shadowed, which means it doesn't actually count for this, but it's there for when you're doing deck construction and such. So, this with a lot of these types of uh icons. For example, in previous turns, I could have filled them up with these two cards that both have those icons. And then play this, it would have done two damage, two attack. And attacking is just attacking, you know, a a uh you know, a creature or a champion next to you by default. There's also different attacks. We'll talk vaguely about them, you know, in a little bit future. So, I could do these type of things. So, we can move.
So, each movement costs one. I Let's say I spawned here and I came up and moved here. Now, there's different parts of the board. For example, this is a wall. If I was here and I could move two, I couldn't move through that wall there. There's also normal ground. There's high ground, this one. And there's low ground like this. There's also voids like these ones that you cannot move through. And high ground is important because if you're attacking someone and you're on high ground, if they're on a ground lower than you, you get a plus one, for example. Now, let's just say I moved here. Why would I do that? Well, there's other things on the board, too. Like, you'll see that there's those minions there. And the different game modes are going to have different types of minions. Uh there's three different types. There's two of each in this mode. And each of these are going to actually activate as well throughout the the round, and they're going to move and attack and do different things. Because if I end my turn here, or I have attacked a minion on my turn, it becomes aggro to me.
Meaning, at the end of my turn, this minion is going to be controlled by the other player, and it's going to come at me and attack me. So, you don't want to end your turn next to one, uh or you don't want to damage one unless you want to possibly have the wrath. This one's going to actually do five damage to everything around it and then move two. Uh so, they're they're going to be did do different things there. So, might not want to end my turn there. Now, it actually is good to end up actually getting them down. And as you destroy and do damage to things, you're going to be taking these hit points off. And if you ever completely kill a minion, well, you can actually spawn it as an ally minion on a future turn, and you're going to be able to move them around and do things and act with them. Now, each round there's going to be five different objective cards. I don't know how those happens in a you know, at the very beginning of the round. And two of them actually start uh from the beginning of the game. Those are the easier ones, and then there's some other ones. So, I could go here and say, "Hey, look, I moved two plus spaces this turn. I'm going to get an experience point." So, I get an experience counter, and I can use that. Now, most of the time, uh on some of these other ones, if someone does it, if someone else does it, too, they only get one experience point. So, it's sort of a race. If you're the first to do 12 damage, if I did 12 damage, I go here, I'm going to get four experience points.
If anyone else does that, it's going to only get one. And the ones that have been completed will get discarded at the end of the round, and new ones will come out. So, getting these different experience points is good because if you're next to one of these, it has an upgrade on it, which is this little piece here, you can spend that experience point to upgrade things.
And there's all sorts of different things you can upgrade. For example, three experience points would allow you to flip this, and now your max health is going to be four, right now. Before it was two, and you actually, in this case, would get the difference as well. So, I would have gotten two there, and my max health would be four if I upgraded that. If you upgrade this, well, this gives me it's it would cost me two. I can flip this, and now I gain an additional energy every time I slide something off. And those get better the more you upgrade those. Now here, like I could spend two and flip this over. Now I always have either one of these, and you could use only one of them per action, but I could use this on one action and this on another action. And this would have been great for that other card that I had just played that would give me attack for each one of these. So you can upgrade these. This is sort of a wild a wild one. Now, each character uh champion also has some persistent sort of abilities that helps with your play style as well. Those don't have to be upgraded. You simply just have all those as well. There's also skills that cost a certain amount. And it tells you what you'd get it. So if if I'm flying, I can get, you know, I get to move one. And so if I if I get this, then I flip it over like this, and this just tells me that I have this going. Now, if I want to spend an additional one or an additional two, I can upgrade this to either side, either A or B, depending on which one I spent. One of them is better than another. So there's different skills that you can upgrade as well, three different ones for each of your champions. And so activating cards is is a big thing that you're doing. Again, you're sometimes you're attacking, you're moving, you're moving up your defense.
Defense is moving up, and then that allows you to When you get taken damage, instead of taking damage, you would take this until it's zero, then you'd start actually taking damage. Now, taking damage is bad, but you don't It's not the end of the world, cuz if you die in this game, you still get to respawn. Another thing you do on your turn is play a relic. Now, with this one would cost one energy, and you slide it into any one of these three spots. Each spot can only have one. And this sort of act it update upgrades this slot. So, this gives me When you activate this, it has plus one plus one space when moving. And so, but this is going to slide down next time, and so I got to think, well, what am I going to put here, right? And so, activating relics is is is really interesting. And you might also be doing that because there is a master of arms objective that says have three equipped relics. You'd get two experience points. There's also spells where you spend the the energy, and you just discard it and do the effect. Like your next piercing attack can pierce through walls.
Now, we haven't talked a lot about attacking, but generally normal attack is just next to you. There's different types of ranged attacks. There's projectile attacks that can go in non-straight lines. Piercing attacks actually, in this case, it would go through the wall, but piercing attacks generally will go through. So, if there was another enemy on the other side of them, it would go through and hit all of them. So, there's all different types of attack modes as well. So, the main types of actions, you know, the moving, the attacking, defending, drawing cards, pushing and pulling. These all allow you to push or pull enemies closer to you or away from you depending on where you want them to be and for different strategies. There's also different types of things that might happen, like bleeding, root, or vicious. These do all sorts of different things, like bleeding will, you know, do you damage every turn, things like that, different conditions that you'll get to. Now, a couple of the concepts in this specific mode of play is at the towers. At the end of your turn, so each of your towers is controlled by one of the players. So, I might control this one, my teammate might control the other one.
At the end of my turn, if there's anyone in this zone, this is the whole zone of this tower, this tower will do three damage to the closest enemy to it. So, this one would do actually do three damage to it. Now, they're trying to do damage to this cuz as they do damage, you know, they take these off, and that's important because again, the way you win is by destroying the other two players' towers. The other way that that that they can do damage to the towers is if if you kill an enemy champion. If this one killed me, for example, they put a death token here and they would move one. Next time they kill someone, they'd put one here and they'd move two. So, it just removes them. So, you can actually destroy towers indirectly by destroying the champions of that tower. Another interesting point is there's two neutral spawn points. And who at the end of the round, whoever has the most units, like our team has the most units around this, this actually comes off.
So, this actually sticks to the board. This comes off. It's magnetic. Now, this is sort of suction cup to the board, and boom. So, you can have that and now that's a spawn point for me. So, that's a really cool idea. The last concept I want to go over is the team aspect in this game. So, as you do damage to minions, their health trackers will go here. And it's sort of a shared bank. And again, when you kill one, you'll get that and you'll put your tracker under it, and you can take as many of these when you're spawning and put this out there. It shows you control, it shows the health, and these are shared between the two teammates, so that has some strategy as well. And also, with you and your teammate, you are allowed to look at your teammate's hand and sort of work together like that. And that's the main concepts of the the siege 2 versus 2 game. And as I mentioned, there is a one versus one siege mode that comes with a different board, different setup, and also there's some different rules that have to go along with that as well. And there's also head hunters mode, which is two to four players, and it's a free for all skirmish combat game. You're going to be killing minions, stealing them right under your unsuspecting opponent's nose, catching minions' heads at the right moment for a bounty of points, and it also uses the smaller board.
Well, there is the Trials of Maya, and as I showed in the overview, you can play in three different modes, being a siege 2 versus 2 team game or siege 1 versus 1, and head hunters. Now, if you'd like to see the most up-to-date art and components and all the different pledge levels available, you can click the link just below me in the description of this video. That's going to bring you directly to the crowdfunding project page, and I'm sure that the Department of Lore Ink would love your support.