The Best Kickstarter and Gamefound Board Games Launching This September

Kickstarter board games still carry most of the volume and most of the small, strange, wonderful projects. Gamefound has pulled a lot of the heavier tabletop campaigns across with its native pledge manager. If you back regularly you check both, so this list covers both.

Trials of MAYA (Gamefound, launches September 8)

Trials of MAYA is on Gamefound rather than Kickstarter, and it is the most ambitious thing launching this month.

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, with nine asymmetric champions across five game modes and 340-plus cards, published by Department of Lore.

The core mechanism is the Energy Gambit. Cards slide across a three-slot action mat each round, the one falling off pays energy, and you commit a new card face down before everyone reveals at once. Its number sets your initiative now and returns as your energy two rounds later, so speed today is bought against power tomorrow.

Big Boss Battle headlined its preview by calling it “an accessible, exciting tabletop MOBA.” Player Elimination, writing after multiple plays of a near-final copy, described the card system as where the design’s mechanical budget has almost entirely gone.

The arena stays deliberately simple, with a grid, walls, spikes, high and low ground and voids, plus push and pull that can deal collision damage against an obstruction. The depth is in the champions: passive abilities, stats you upgrade during the match by completing objectives, and decks constructed beforehand from a pool gated by species and class. The stated goal is a system players can build their own decks, arenas and modes on.

For anyone who has followed collectible card games, the contents model matters: full card lists published before preorder, contents fixed at print, no boosters, no random pulls, no gameplay-exclusive backer cards. Designers Zain Memon and Anand Gandhi previously made SHASN: AZADI, winner of Best Board or Tabletop Game for Impact at the 2023 Games for Change Awards.

Rulebooks and public metadata are on BoardGameGeek; full spec on the official site.

Also worth a look

Snap Ships Tactics: Massive Expansion + Reprint (Kickstarter, ends September 15). The constructible miniatures game roughly doubles with four Battleships and Capital Ships. You build your ships from parts, and the build is a strategic decision.

FIEF: France (Gamefound, ends September 17). Marriages, betrayals and control of the papacy, with enough negotiation that the table talk becomes the main event.

Opera Magna (Gamefound, ends September 22). From the Barrage and Potion Explosion designers. A cathedral to supply and a market that shifts with every action.

Reign of Runes (Kickstarter, ends September 18). Card and dice drafting, Norse dressing. Plunder silver, build a warband.

Spirit Train (Kickstarter, ends September 10). You are a conductor carrying souls to the afterlife on a railway between worlds.

Jungle King (Kickstarter, ends September 16). Asian animal chess reimagined as a magnetic foldable art object with added depth.

ShuffleChess (Kickstarter, ends September 29). Chess movement compressed into a fast, portable card game.

Does the platform matter?

A little. Gamefound handles add-ons, shipping and late pledges natively rather than through a separate system months later, and it runs follower gifts, which is why following a campaign like Trials of MAYA before launch actually gets you something. Kickstarter has scale, discovery and a longer track record.

Platform tells you about the publisher’s operational preferences. What tells you about the game is the proof behind it: a playable version you can try, published contents you can evaluate, and independent coverage from people who put their review policy on the page.

Follow or back Trials of MAYA on Gamefound when the campaign opens on September 8.