Games Like Cloudspire: Two Ways to Build a Battlefield

Cloudspire is a big, strange, ambitious thing. Chip Theory Games took tower defence and MOBA lane pressure, put them in the floating realm of Ankar, and built the whole game out of poker chips and neoprene. If you are looking for games like Cloudspire, the question worth asking first is which half of it you liked.

Because the two halves pull in different directions, and the answers are different games.

What Cloudspire actually is

Four asymmetric factions fight over a resource called Source. You build spires on Source wells to defend your territory, send waves of minions down paths toward the enemy fortress, and send heroes out to explore, gather and fight. The game runs over four waves, with an event deck and a market between them, and it ends when a fortress falls.

It plays 1 to 4 with solo and co-op scenario books, and it is heavy. Roughly forty-five minutes per player, ages 12 and up, and a table full of chips.

The distinctive part is the scale. You are commanding an economy, a defensive network and a small army at once. Your heroes matter, but they are pieces on a larger board rather than the whole story.

If you liked the economy and the army

Go bigger on the strategic layer.

Root is the obvious next step for asymmetric factions with genuinely different engines, at a fraction of the table space.

Rising Sun and Blood Rage give you the army and the territory without the tower defence, with negotiation or drafting driving the tension.

Guards of Atlantis II keeps the MOBA structure and strips the economy back, focusing on hero play in lanes.

If you liked the champions and the tactical fights

Go the other way: fewer units, more depth per unit. That is where Trials of MAYA sits, out on Gamefound September 8, 2026.

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 fighting on grid arenas.

The structural difference from Cloudspire is scope. Cloudspire gives you a faction to command. Trials of MAYA gives you one champion to pilot, and puts the depth inside it: passive abilities, stats you upgrade mid-match through open objectives, and a deck you construct before play from a card pool gated by that champion’s species and two classes.

Two things will feel familiar, though.

Minions are a resource, not decoration. In Trials of MAYA they start hostile. Damage one and its health chips bank into your pool. Land the kill, take its head token, and you can spend from that pool to respawn it under your control. Like Cloudspire, you are building a board presence rather than just clearing obstacles, and like Cloudspire the components are chip stacks you can read at a glance.

Lanes and towers are the win condition. Its flagship Siege mode runs three lanes with towers to bring down and defend, in 2v2 and 1v1.

What is different is the clock. Cloudspire runs on waves. Trials of MAYA runs on the Energy Gambit: each round you commit a card face down onto a three-slot action mat and reveal simultaneously, with that card setting your initiative now and returning as energy two rounds later.

Rulebooks and public metadata are on BoardGameGeek, the full breakdown is on the official page, and there is a Tabletop Simulator build.

Choosing

If the pleasure of Cloudspire was watching a plan you set up three waves ago pay off across a whole battlefield, stay in the strategic lane.

If it was the moment-to-moment fights, the hero decisions and the positioning, then games like Cloudspire at a tighter scale will suit you better, and Trials of MAYA is aimed squarely there.

Follow or back Trials of MAYA on Gamefound.