In a video game MOBA, minions are the economy. They walk down lanes, they die, and killing them converts your time into gold and experience. Every tabletop MOBA has to decide what that becomes on a board, and most settle for treating minions as damage sources or scoring tokens.
Making them capturable changes the whole shape of the mode. Here is how.
The design problem
Farming works in a video game because it happens in real time and costs you attention. You are choosing between last-hitting and rotating to help a teammate, and that choice is expensive because the clock does not stop.
Turn-based games have no clock. So if minions just die and pay you points, farming becomes a chore with no tension: obviously you kill the minion, because nothing else is happening while you do it.
The interesting solutions make minions valuable in a way that competes with itself.
Banked health as a currency
Trials of MAYA, out on Gamefound September 8, 2026, uses a chip-based system that turns minions into a resource you take from each other.
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. Its flagship Siege mode uses lanes, towers and minions in 2v2 and 1v1.
Minions are represented as stacks of health chips with a character disk on top, so a minion’s remaining health is readable from across the table.
When you damage a minion, its health chips move into your pool. When you deliver the killing blow you take its head token, and the minion becomes loyal to you. To bring it back onto the board you spend from your banked pool, choosing how much health to give it.
Chips stripped from the opposing team’s minions flow into your bank as well, which makes the board a closed economy. Health is not created and destroyed, it circulates.
What that does to decisions
Four things follow, and together they are why this is more interesting than farming for points.
Chipping competes with killing. Damage a minion without finishing it and you bank health cheaply, but you leave it standing and available to your opponent. Take the kill immediately and you get the minion but less fuel to respawn it with.
Deployment is a real choice. With a full pool, do you field several fragile minions to cover ground, or one durable one to hold a lane?
Enemy minions are targets worth taking, not just clearing. Killing something the other team built does not just remove a threat, it transfers the resource.
Farming builds an army. Time spent on minions produces a board presence rather than a number, which means it competes directly with pushing towers instead of being strictly worse than it.
Player Elimination, writing after multiple plays, singled this system out as the game’s most impressive concept.
Minions in the rest of the tabletop MOBA field
Guards of Atlantis II uses minions as lane pressure that you push, with the wave state as the primary strategic object. Skytear uses them for lane control alongside miniatures.
Both are good solutions. The distinction with a capture system is that minions change ownership, so the same units serve both sides over the course of a game and every kill is a swing rather than a subtraction.
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 try the economy for yourself.
Follow or back Trials of MAYA on Gamefound.