Building a board game MOBA means answering a translation question. A MOBA runs on real time, respawn timers and last-hitting. A board game has none of those. So which parts do you keep?
Siege, the flagship mode of Trials of MAYA, is a good case study, because its answers are specific and you can see the reasoning behind each one.
What is Trials of MAYA?
Trials of MAYA is an expandable card-driven arena combat game. It combines three genres: MOBAs, classic 90s tactics games, and TCGs without booster packs. It plays 1 to 4 players in 60 to 180 minutes for ages 14 and up. Siege runs as 2v2, The Battle for Dhaara, and 1v1, Skirmish for Vyati. It launches on Gamefound September 8, 2026.
The map: three lanes, towers, bases
Siege keeps the architecture. You fight down three lanes toward the enemy base, bringing down their towers while defending your own. Towers are defensive structures that attack autonomously, which preserves the thing towers do in a MOBA: they make territory expensive.
The push and pull dynamic survives too. Every step forward is a step away from your own towers, which is the central spatial tension of the genre and it translates cleanly to a board.
The arena itself stays deliberately simple. A grid with walls, spikes, high and low ground and voids, plus spawn points to seize. Push and pull actions can shove a unit into an obstruction for collision damage. It is a short vocabulary that gives you enough variety to make position matter without turning the map into a second rulebook.
The clock: initiative instead of cooldowns
This is the hard problem. In a MOBA, urgency comes from timers running whether you act or not.
Siege replaces that with the Energy Gambit. Each round you commit a card face down onto a three-slot action mat and everyone reveals at once. The card’s number sets your initiative for the round, lower acting earlier, and returns as your energy two rounds later. Going first has a price you pay in advance, without knowing what anyone else chose.
That reproduces the core MOBA decision, spend now or scale later, in a form a turn-based board game MOBA can actually use.
The economy: minions you capture
Farming is the part most board game MOBA designs handle least convincingly, because a minion that just dies is a scoring token.
In Siege, minions are semi-autonomous hostiles with distinct behaviors, some charging and hitting hard, some attacking at range and rooting targets, some slow tanks dealing area damage. They are represented as stacks of health chips with a character disk on top, so you can read a minion’s remaining health from across the table.
Damage one and its health banks into your pool. Land the killing blow, take its head chip, and the minion becomes yours. You spend from your banked pool to respawn it at whatever health you can afford, and chips stripped from the opposing team’s minions flow into your bank too.
So farming builds an army instead of a score, and every swing carries a decision: take the kill now, or chip longer to bank more first.
The scaling: XP inside the match
A MOBA hero who is identical at minute five and minute forty has lost the genre’s arc.
Objectives sit open beside the arena and pay XP, with the first champion to complete a non-starter objective taking the full reward and each champion claiming one per round. XP buys max health, permanent energy income, extra trait symbols and champion skills that branch into one of two second-level versions.
Different objectives reward different playstyles, so the progression race is itself contested.
2v2 or 1v1
The 2v2 mode, The Battle for Dhaara, is where the lane structure has the most room to breathe, since two players per side means genuine role division and coordination. The 1v1, Skirmish for Vyati, compresses the same system into a duel where reading a single opponent becomes the dominant skill.
Both run on the same rules. Nothing is bolted on.
Rulebooks and public metadata are on BoardGameGeek, the full breakdown is on the official page, and there is a Tabletop Simulator build with both Siege modes if you want to see the translation working before September 8.
Follow or back Trials of MAYA on Gamefound.