Trials of Maya - Board Game Preview
Transcript
Hello everyone. This is Johannes and you are watching Board Gaming Ramblings. And today I am taking a look at Trials of Maya. This is an upcoming crowdfunding game. You can check out the link in the description if you are interested in that. And just you know it, as always with a preview this is a prototype. So everything can and will be changed. Not will. It it might be changed. It's not like everything will be changed but they are allowed to change whatever they want. This game, Trials of Maya, is a tower defense game. We have seen those kind of games before. This one is doing some interesting things that we are going to take a look at. This game can be played either as a free for all. It can be played as a one versus one, which is what I have set up here. Or it can be played as a two versus two, which means two players are on one team and two players are on the other team trying to defeat the other players' towers. That's the same thing you're doing in a two-player game. It's I'm not going to go into the details of the rules or anything like that. I just set up this two-player board because it's smaller and easier to get in frame. This game is all about managing resources, cards, experience, objectives, and of course trying to defend your tower from the other player. In the game you are going to have this little row of cards. The cards that are in this row lets you know which actions you can do. The actions will be moving around, pushing enemies,
pulling enemies, attacking enemies, defending, and doing different special abilities. Every round one of these cards is going to slide out of your player board and it's going to give you energy depending on the card that you played noted here down in the bottom. And that is going to be the energy you pay to then later use the cards. Then you're going to play card. The card is going to choose the player order and it's also going to change out the actions that you can do. There is some symbols that may change some different actions. For example, this one says that on arrival, gain one defense for each of this symbol action that you have on your mat. So, the order you're playing things in is also interesting. And let's talk about the one thing. This game is a deck-building style game. It's not like a CCG where you buy packs. This is one where you can build a deck. Is that my favorite thing to do? No. So, for me, if I'm going to play this game more, I would probably use the pre-built decks.
And I think that there are a lot of variety in those, because you're not going to see all of the cards or play all of the cards in like a specific grow. It's going to change up every time you play. And there are four heroes, at least in this prototype that we had, which have very different play styles and different abilities and different decks that they can use. I think that if you are going to get this and you are not into deck building, you might get a little bit less from the game than if you are highly into that customization and deck building and stuff like that. But, probably there are going to be people putting out decks that you can try. And the deck building isn't It is not like a Magic the Gathering where you have like, "Here is a thousand cards. Let's build a deck." It's a smaller pool of cards than that.
Another very interesting thing about this game is the experience point system. I like customization. I like upgrading stuff. And in this game, you do it in a very interesting way, because your main goal is to defeat the other player's tower. But, every round there's going to be different objectives laid out on the table. And you're kind of racing for them, because when somebody claims on that objective, it's going to be gone next round. So, I can claim one objective on my turn. And when I do, I will get some experience. And then, if I am on my turn adjacent to one of these tied little I don't know what to call them, like things, antennas, with these little thing like that on top of it, I can then use my experience to upgrade my board in many interesting ways. I can upgrade my energy gain. So, every time a card slides out, it's going to give me more energy. I can upgrade my health. I can also upgrade these symbols. I briefly talked about them. So, you could have symbols that dictates or the cards dictate how many symbols you have of other thing can be better. You can also upgrade these cards. So, you have three cards that you can upgrade once to basically get like the ability and then you can upgrade it to a A or a B side, which again adds variety to the different types that you play There are so many like parts to go. I really enjoyed the fact that you have a kind of It's a customizable deck building if you enjoy that, but there's also customization while you play, which I am more of a fan of that I can build my strategy both around the cards that I play, but also around the different upgrades that I do upgrade on my board.
On the board, it's going to be minions and it's also also going to be, of course, the hero from the other player. And the minions are going to attack you if you attack them or if you move beside them on your turn. Also, whenever you attack a minion, you will take their life chips. Oh, sorry for booming that around. Boom. Stay there. I will take the life chips and those will go into my pile here. And then later on, I can use those life to put them into the game with a minion that I have. For example, if I kill a minion or in a two-player game, you start with your own minion, which then adds even more tactics. Should I wait, depending, of course, on how much the other character is pushing towards your tower. You might not wait because you need someone to defend your your tower or you might wait to get like a higher stack of energy or life to be able to have a better minion on the board. Trials of Maya is a very interesting game. And we have felt it can be quite long, but I think like if you play it more with the same group and you know the cards and all of these kind of games, it's always better when you draw a card, "Oh, okay, I can use that for this." It's going to take that play time down. I would say if you are interested in customization, deck building, or in just like a customizationable game, I don't know if that's a word, customizationable.
I don't think it's a word, but I I said it. So, now it's a word on this channel. Then this might be for you. And the tower defense, pushing and pulling, trying to get your characters over there before dying. If you die, you will lose some stuff, but it's not like you're out, your character's not out of the game, which would be horrible. If any of these things sounds interesting to you, and we have a link in the description that you can check out. If it doesn't sound interesting to you, then you can go and play any other game on your shelf, because you probably have a lot of those as well. And that's the end. If you enjoyed this video, you can subscribe. If you didn't enjoy the video, you can still subscribe, because we do a lot of different videos. We hope you enjoyed this video. Thank you so much for watching. I'm Johannes, and you've been watching Board Gaming Ramblings, and bye-bye.