Imagine a living supercomput in the shape of a tree. This is Maya. And it can predict behavior at a massive scale.
It does so by running trials. That's where I come in. As the echo of one of many legendary champions, my [music] deeds in this arena each serve as a unique point of data, all serving to calculate destiny.
I stand, I fight, I kill, I die, all in the service of something greater. Through my actions, Maya can predict societal shifts, natural disasters, political uprisings. [music] Anything that can happen, Maya sees, and I'm a part of that.
So, no matter how many times I fall, I will gladly return to the fight. Maya, through me, you will answer the most important questions anyone could ever pose. All right, loser does dishes.
Better luck next time. worth it. Hey folks, my name is Jay Parker and this is RTFM, the show where I teach you how to play a game.
And today we're looking at Trials of Maya, a competitive strategy game where you control powerful champions pitted against each other in endless battles. You'll play in teams or in a free-for-all depending on the game mode you choose, and you'll need to manage some predictions of your own in order to best utilize the game strategic cardplay systems. But if you can plan ahead, calculate your opponent's intentions, and manipulate the battlefield to your favor, you just might prevail in the Trials of Maya.
So, let's learn how to play. All right, we've got an exciting game ahead of us, but before we dive in, just a few bits of important information. First off, this video was commissioned by the publishers Department of Lore for their Gamefound campaign.
If you think this game seems interesting, check out the link in the description to check out their crowdfunding page. Of course, this does mean that I'm using a prototype for this video, so the components will look a little different from how they will when this game is published. And second, while I don't expect there to be any rules mistakes in this video, as the designers will be double-checking it, in case there are any errors or if some things change by the time this game gets fully released, I'll be posting any corrections in the Klingon subtitles channel.
So, please turn those on or check the description box below. And with that out of the way, let's get started. In Trials of Maya, you will be playing as a legendary hero in a simulated battle against other larger than-l life figures.
This takes place in a fantastical world with all kinds of different species. So, you could play as Snakeman, Monkey Girl, Robo Bird, or even Human Guy with other characters available in expansions. While there are a couple of different game modes that you can play, the standard experience is called Siege and is similar to MOBAs like League of Legends or Dota.
You'll be on a team of two trying to destroy your opponent's towers while keeping your own alive. You'll also be fighting and taking control of minions and capturing spawn points to help with your advance. You'll be able to take actions shown on the three cards on your player board, but these will slide to the right every round.
So, you'll need to plan ahead to stay useful in the fight. And as you go, you'll gain experience from a cycling market of objectives and use that XP to level up your character. So, let's set things up and get started.
Again, there are different game modes, including a 1v one siege mode, as well as head hunters, a more free-for-all battle, and these will have different setups as well as a few different rules, but I'll be covering them at the end of the video. For now, you'll have a map that looks like this. You've got two towers, each belong to one player on each team, and these will have either 9 or 12 health chips, depending on whether you've set up a short or long game.
A short game is recommended for your first time playing, so that's what I've got here. You'll also have two spawn points per team, as well as two neutral ones, some minions, five objective cards, two of them starting cards and the other three random, an initiative track, and some extra bits and bobs nearby. Next, each player will choose a character, each with quite different play styles, and grab their player board.
There's a lot going on here, but most of it needs to be unlocked before you can benefit from it. What you do have access to from the start are three innate abilities, a few trackers measuring health, your starting value shown here, defense, and energy, a deck of cards that can be adjusted, but for your first game, you'll just use the starter cards, and a few random memory cards that will fill the three slots on your player board. You'll draw these cards and then place them in an order of your choice.
This is important because these not only provide you with the actions you can take on your turn, but at the beginning of each round, these cards will slide to the right, gaining you the energy listed on the bottom right of the card that leaves your board. And there's a few more things that happen each round. So, let's go over the round structure before we get to the actual meat of the game.
At the start, we have the refresh phase. This is purely admin. First, looking at the XP cards.
If non-starting cards have player tokens on them, they'll get removed. And then you'll put out new cards to get you up to five. Next, each player will draw up to their hand size, which is shown on their player board.
If you had as many or more cards in hand already, just skip this part. And if your draw pile is empty, shuffle your discard and form a new deck before drawing. And lastly, you'll reset any activated action cards to deactivate it.
Next is the slide phase, where you slide the cards over and gain energy. Like I mentioned, if any cards had an onexit effect, these will trigger as the card leaves your board. Then each player will choose a new card from their hand and place it face down in the first slot.
During the initiative phase, each player will then flip that card and determine the player order for the next round. Whoever played a card that will earn them the least energy when that card eventually leaves the board will be first. Then whoever would get the second least goes second, and so on.
If any players are tied, the player who's ahead on the tiebreaker track will go earlier in turn order, and then their marker will move to the end of the track. And lastly, if any cards have honor arrival effects, they'll trigger now in initiative order. After these three phases is the player phase, which is where the vast majority of the game takes place.
Players will spawn their heroes, take the actions of any allied minions, and then take their own actions. I'll cover this in detail over the next two sections, but the gist of this is that each card has several actions on it, and you can activate one card at a time by paying its energy cost. You'll then perform as many actions on the card as you like before activating another card.
Or if you're out of things to do or you just don't feel like doing anything else, you'll pass and end your action step. You'll then end your player phase by discarding as many cards as you like. And then you'll pass to the next player in initiative order.
Once each player has taken a player phase, you'll start a new round. And again, for siege mode, which is what I'll be teaching for most of this video, the goal is to destroy both of the opponent's towers, after which the game immediately ends. So, with all that in mind, let's learn how to take some actions.
[music] So, while we're mostly just covering the actions you can take in this section, I want to start by recapping the player phase. First off, you'll respawn your hero at a controlled spawn point. You'll always control the two spawn points near your towers, but if you've taken control of either of the neutral spawn points, you can pop up there instead.
We'll talk about how to take control of them in a bit. You'll need to spawn at the beginning of your first turn, but you'll also respawn if you've been killed. Dying in this game is not the end for you, but it does have some consequences.
Again, I'll cover those later. Next is allied minion actions. When you defeat a minion, you'll take control of them and can spawn them onto the board during your turn.
If you already have a minion on the board at the beginning of your turn, you can take the actions shown on its chip, also called its head. These actions are the same as yours, but we haven't covered any of the actions yet. So, let's keep moving.
Next, you have the start of turn, which is just a timing window for any effects with the start of turn tag. And then you'll take player actions. These mostly involve taking the actions on your cards.
And as we saw, the way you do this is by selecting a card, paying its energy cost, and activating it. Then you can take any of the actions on the card in any order. However, you have to complete an action before moving on to the next one.
So, if something gives you two move, you can't move one, then take another action, then move one again. Also, if you activate a second card, you can't take any more actions on the first, even if you had some you hadn't done yet. Some cards will also have additional effects, but the cards will describe how they work, so I won't get into it.
Just know that cards with passive abilities don't need to be activated for their effects to trigger. So, that's how you use action cards. But, there are also two other types of cards, spells and relics.
These can be played on your turn or on other players turns if it says reaction and will never go onto your player board. Spells are one and done. So you pay the cost, perform the effect, and discard the card.
Relics, on the other hand, get played beneath one of the three action card slots. Then when you activate the card in that slot, the relic will boost it in some way. There are a lot of different benefits the relics will give you.
I'll let you discover them on your own. The only restriction is that each slot can only hold one relic. If you want to place a new relic in a slot, you'll have to discard the old one first.
Also, when you die, all equipped relics get discarded. So, when you've done all you want to do and end your turn, you'll hit the end of turn timing window. And lastly, you'll discard any cards from your hand that you don't want to keep.
So, let's take some actions. There are six main actions, though some of these can be modified a little bit. They'll usually have a large number, and this is the value of the action.
Starting with move, these actions let you move your character a number of spaces equal to the value. You can't move through enemies, but you can move through allies. You can't end in the same space as an ally, though, as each space only has room for one unit at a time.
Now, looking at the map, there are a few things to be aware of. The first thing you might notice are the different zones shown by clumps of similarly colored spaces. These don't really affect movement, but they will come into play due to various game effects.
What you should look out for are walls, voids, and spikes. When it comes to movement, walls and voids are simple. You can't move through walls, and you can't move into or through voids.
You can move into or through spikes, but they're very pointy. So, if you do, you'll take one damage. Slide your HP marker down one to show this.
There are some ways around this, though, you know, besides literally going around it. See, our monkey girl has a unique ability, which is that once per turn, she can turn a regular move into a jump. Jumping lets us move over any figures, terrain, or walls without suffering any penalty.
We still can't go through voids, though, and we also have to go in a straight line and must move the exact amount of spaces the action says. Though, we are allowed to end our move on a unit. We just then have to fall off of it onto an adjacent space.
Different characters have special abilities like this, and there are two more to cover for now. First is root. If you have any root tokens, these will block a single movement before being discarded.
So, if you have two root tokens and free move, you'll only be able to move one space, but then those two root tokens will go away. Next is flight. Little known fact, birds can fly.
So, Moravi here has an ability that can get her in the air. When she's in flight, she can also move over everything but voids. But unlike with jump, she can't end her move in another unit's space.
The other benefit of flight is that she's always considered to be on higher ground than anyone on the boring old floor. High ground has to do with attacking. So, let's cover that next.
This symbol lets you attack, and unless there's a range to the attack, which I'll cover shortly, you need to be adjacent to your target. You also can't attack through walls, so these spaces are not considered adjacent. There's no chance involved with attacks.
Your target simply takes the damage that you deal. However, if you're on higher ground, they'll take one additional damage. A flying character is always on higher ground than their target as we've seen, but these symbols on the map will also refer to height.
This one means the space is on high ground, whereas this one indicates low ground, and spaces without a symbol are flat ground. Also, Provocar will place these colony tiles that change the space to high ground. There's more to them than just that, but you can find out about the other effects the first time you play.
Anyway, all that matters here is whether or not the attacker is higher than the defender to get the bonus. If you're on the same level or lower than the defender, there's no penalty. It's just a normal attack.
Next, let's talk about ranged attacks, of which there are a few kinds. If there's a small number next to the attack, that's telling you how much range the attack has. And the arrow will tell you what kind it is.
A straight arrow is a basic ranged attack. A curved arrow is a projectile. And if the arrow looks like it's breaking through something, that's a piercing attack.
Let's do a basic range attack first. These need to go in a straight line and can hit a target a number of spaces away equal to the range. Like movement, this gets blocked by walls, voids, and enemy units, but you can shoot through allied units.
Piercing attacks are similar, but don't stop when they hit an enemy unit, meaning that if there's another unit behind it within range, that'll get hit as well. Now, projectiles are a little different because they don't move in a straight line, so they can go around voids, but they can also go over enemies and walls. And the last type of attack hits all adjacent.
Again, walls will block this, but otherwise, an attack like this will hit every adjacent enemy. And I specify enemy because there's no friendly fire in this game. Anytime you would do damage or impart a negative status effect on an ally, unless the action specifically says to target all units, you don't hit your friends.
Speaking of status effects, there are four of them: root, bleed, vish, and flight. Root and flight we've seen. So, moving on to vish.
This one's a little weird. You might apply it directly to an enemy or place it on the board. It'll get picked up by any enemy that moves onto it, but Vish doesn't do anything on its own.
Instead, Kashar will have some specific ways to interact with these tokens. Bleed, however, is pretty simple. Whenever you activate an action card, as soon as you're done with your actions, you'll take one true damage for each bleed you have, but then at the end of your turn, you'll discard all your bleed tokens.
True damage is like regular damage except it bypasses defense. Since we haven't talked about defense, let's cover that right now. This shield symbol grants defense, which bumps up your little shield tracker.
Defense will block normal damage before it hits your health, unless of course you're dealt true damage. And this marker can only go as high as your maximum health value. And that's all there is to defending.
It's nice and easy. And another easy one is the card draw action. This just lets you draw as many cards as the strength of the action.
You have no hand limit, so go nuts. And as I mentioned before, if your deck runs out and you need to keep drawing, shuffle your discard into a new draw pile. Now, the last two actions, push and pull, are pretty similar.
They move around enemies and allies. But there are some slight differences. Starting with pull, this targets a single entity up to X spaces away in a straight line.
Like basic ranged attacks, this is blocked by walls, voids, and enemies. Then the entity moves towards you in that straight line until it's next to you or is stopped by an ally. And that's all for pulling.
Pushing is a little more violent, though. This targets an adjacent entity and pushes it x spaces away in a straight line. However, if it's stopped by a wall, void, or unit, it takes collision damage equal to the number of spaces it didn't get to move.
And if it runs into another enemy, both of them take collision damage. Remember that there's no friendly fire, though. So, if you push it into one of your allies or you push your ally into an enemy, only the enemy takes the collision damage.
And those are all the actions you'll be taking. But so far, I've only shown you actions with numbers on them. The thing is, a lot of your action cards will have variable strengths depending on specific trait symbols.
These symbols will show up on the cards you play and your player board after you've upgraded these tokens. Something I'll cover in the next section. And when you see a symbol like this, where you'd otherwise see a number, the value is equal to how many of that symbol is visible on your board.
So, let's say we've played this to crusher card and we want to crush some toes cuz we nasty. the strength of our attack will be equal to the Vanguard symbols on our board. Now, this is a Vanguard card, but the symbol is slashed, which means it's not going to count.
The reason the symbol is even here is for the deck crafting aspect of this game, which I'll get to later. The symbols on the top of our board also don't count as they're just a reminder of what traits our character has. Now, we do have this punitive measures card on our board, and that symbol is intact, so it will apply.
And let's say we flipped over one of our trait tokens. This gives us access to both of these traits, which means you're up to two vanguard symbols, and so the attack has two strength. And there are a few more things to know about these action value modifiers.
First off, there's this wild symbol, which will count as any trait. Next, instead of one specific trait, some cards will be looking for how many unique traits you have. And this icon counts how many relics you've attached.
And that's all you need to know for the actions you'll take in this game. But there are still a few advanced concepts to cover. So, we're going to dive into those next.
All right, we've plowed through the basics, but what's left will really make this game sing. Since we recently mentioned upgrades, let's start with that. At the start of the game, five objective cards will be laid out.
Two starting cards and three random ones. During your turn, if you complete any of these objectives, you can score one of them and gain the corresponding XP. If it's a starting card and you scored the harder objective, flip the card.
If it had already been flipped, it gets removed from the game. If it was a random objective, place your marker there. Any cards with player markers will be discarded at the start of the next round, and then you'll place new ones until there are five in the display.
It's also important to know that if you score an objective that another player has already scored, even if it's an ally, you'll only gain one XP. Now, if you're adjacent to an eligible upgrade point, indicated by the spire having this chunky piece on it, you can spend XP on your turn to gain any upgrades you can pay for. We've seen these trait tokens, but there are three other things you can upgrade.
Going from top to bottom, first up is your max HP, and as soon as you upgrade this, gain health equal to the difference. So, if we go from 6 to 10, we'd gain four hit points. Below that, we have energy boosts.
These will gain us an increased amount of energy every time we slide off a card. This doesn't stack, though. You're just looking at the higher amount.
So, if we upgrade this twice, we'll get two more energy per slide. And lastly, we have skill cards. These don't have any effect at the start of the game, but when you upgrade it the first time, you'll gain the basic version of this power by rotating the card.
This card can be upgraded again to its A or B side, though these may cost different amounts of XP. Whichever you pick, flip the card over and set it to that side. This is what it will be for the rest of the game.
So, leveling up is cool, but another way to get stronger is to capture minions. In order to talk about that, let's first cover the different types of units in this game. Anything with a round base is known as an entity.
That includes player characters and minions. The other type of unit is known as an immovable destructible object or IDO for short. The towers are the most prominent examples of these, but Moravi can also build engrams, another kind of IDO with two health that powers a lot of her abilities.
Idos can be targeted by attacks and destroyed, hence the destructible part, but they can't move, hence the immovable part. They also can't be pushed, pulled, or debuffed. Also, at the end of your turn, but before aggroed minions attack, more on that in a moment, if your tower is still alive and there are any enemies in its zone, your tower deals three damage to the closest enemy.
If multiple enemies are equidistant, you choose which one it attacks. Now, back to minions. These guys will start off neutral and will mostly leave you alone.
However, if you've attacked one during your turn or ended your turn next to one, that will aggro the minion. Any aggroed minions will try to attack you at the end of your turn. The closest clockwise enemy player will take an aggro minion's actions for it, but they do have to follow some instructions.
The minion must target you if possible. If it's able to attack you, then it won't move. Or if it needs to move, it'll move as little as possible to get in range.
If it can't target you, it'll try to attack your minions first, then your idos. And if it can't do that, then it'll just try to move as close to you as possible. The minion head will show the actions it takes.
And if there's a line with a little arrow, then that means that they must take these actions in order. Most of these are self-explanatory, but for the can't stop won't stop, the arrow below its movement is telling you that it can only move in a straight line and must move the full three spaces because it can't stop won't stop. It'll only move less than that if it's blocked by something.
So, how does any of that help you? Well, whenever you attack a minion, whether it's neutral or enemy controlled, you'll collect any damage you deal into your HP pool, which is shared with your teammate. Then, whenever you kill a minion, you take control of it and can spawn it with as many hit points as you want, pulling from your HP bank.
Keep in mind, though, that the minion will be controlled by you specifically, not your team. So, it'll only be able to start taking turns on your next player phase because allied minions go before you. Now, lest all of this talk of getting stronger makes you think that you're invincible, you should know that you're definitely going to die in this game.
Luckily, your character lives in a simulation. So, as long as you don't do it too much, dying isn't that bad. When you die, first discard all relics and status tokens you have and remove your character from the board.
You'll also place a death token next to your tower and then damage your tower equal to how many tokens it's accumulated. and HP chips removed from IDOS's are removed from the game, not added to the opponent's HP bank. Then, at the beginning of your next player phase, you'll respawn adjacent to any controlled spawn point with max health.
If all spaces adjacent to the chosen spawn point are occupied, you'll choose a space that is as close as possible to set spawn point and spawn there. This all means that taking control of the neutral spawn points will be pretty useful. And the way that happens is that at the end of each round, you'll check to see who has the most units adjacent to them.
If one team has more than the other, they take control and will keep control until a round ends where the other team has more units adjacent to it. It's important to note though that these spawn points don't have the chunky upgrade bit. Only the home base points do.
So, you can't upgrade here. Now, those are all the gameplay specific rules. At least that's all you need to know to get started.
There are some character specific rules and occasionally you'll see a key word I haven't mentioned, but they'll be easy to figure out using the reference book. Anyway, there's still a few other things to talk about. First, I'll cover deck construction, and then we'll talk about the rules differences for the other game modes.
So, after you've played a game or two, you might want to alter these champions a little bit. Each champion has a species and two classes shown on their playerboard, and these determine their innate abilities and what cards they can have in their deck. Donga here is a vanar, a monkey person.
And she's also a fleetshot and a vanguard, basically an agile tank. She's always going to have these specific abilities which line up to her traits and these skill cards because they're tied to her character. When constructing a new deck for her, she can hold any cards with any of these traits or her signature cards, the ones with her name on them.
Cards that are slashed like this still count as having that trait. They just don't provide the icon during the game. As we saw earlier, your deck must be between 24 and 40 cards.
At least 10 of them must be actions, and you can have a maximum of two copies of each card, or one of each signature card. As long as you follow those rules, you can construct your [clears throat] deck however you like. Though, it's recommended that you keep all three signature cards in your deck, as they tend to combo well with your champions play style.
And let's finish up with the other game modes. 1v1 siege is almost identical to 2v2 siege except you have a smaller map. You have four objective cards instead of five and you both start with an elder coan minion that is permanently loyal to you.
You'll still need to do a little jungling and acquire some minion HP before you do. But when it inevitably gets killed by your opponent, the head returns to you and you can spawn it again later. The only other difference in this game mode is that there is a neutral upgrade point in the middle of the map.
No one ever controls this point, but both players can upgrade while adjacent to it. Lastly, we have Head Hunters, the free-for-all mode that can support two, three, or four players. This will have different maps depending on player count, and is largely about killing minions.
See, the goal of this game mode is to earn points. Eight for a short game, 13 for a long one. And while you'll gain a point every time you kill an enemy champion, you'll gain more points for spawning minions.
Let's say we've got a three-player game going. A new aspect of setup is to prepare this bounty board. We have it on the three player side.
And so we'll randomly draw our six minion cards onto these three spaces. These are telling us the bounties. And depending on which minions we spawn, we'll earn different amounts of points.
Let's say I have a cantop onetop and a big stepper, both number two. If I spawn the canstop two, which is on its own set, I'll earn three points. I can spawn the big stepper two as well, but because it's part of the three minion set, I'll only earn two points.
If I can get another minion from that set and spawn them both at the same time, that'll earn me six points. However, it might be worth it to spawn it now. For one, it'll give me another minion under my control, but also whenever a player kills a champion, in addition to the one point they get, they also steal all minion heads that that champion hasn't spawned yet.
And a few more quick rules. If a neutral minion kills a champion, place a victory point chip on its card. And if it kills a player owned minion, place the minion head on its card.
Whoever kills a minion holding points or minion heads will take those chips from them. And lastly, all spawn and upgrade points are permanently neutral, so all players can use them, and they never change ownership. And that's all you need to know to play Trials of Maya.
I want to say a big thank you to the publishers for sponsoring this video. And if you're interested in this game, please go check out their Gamefound page and consider pledging. Also, while this video was commissioned, I rely heavily on my Patreon backers to support the channel.
So, if I've ever helped you learn a game and you just want to say thank you, joining the Patreon is the best way to do that. Either way, thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time. Bye.
