Games Like BattleCON: Prediction With and Without a Board

BattleCON is the purest prediction game in the hobby. Each turn both players secretly pair a style with a base, reveal simultaneously, and resolve. There is no dice, almost no board, and nothing between you and the fact that you guessed wrong.

If you want games like BattleCON, you are chasing that specific feeling: the moment of reveal, and the knowledge that you lost to a read rather than a roll. Here is where else it lives.

What BattleCON isolates

Level 99’s design strips a fighting game down to its decision layer. Position exists on a simple track, but the real space is your hand: which pairs you have left, which you have burned, and what your opponent thinks you have.

Because both players commit blind and reveal together, every turn is a simultaneous guess with immediate consequences. The character roster is enormous, and matchup knowledge is the skill.

The trade-off is that the board does very little. That is a feature if prediction is what you want and a limitation if you also want spatial problems to solve.

Prediction without a board

Yomi, also from Level 99, is the same designer’s take with a card-based rock-paper-scissors core.

Air, Land & Sea compresses hidden commitment into nine cards and fifteen minutes.

Jaipur and Schotten Totten get at the same read-your-opponent tension in a lighter, faster shape.

Prediction with a board

The other direction keeps the simultaneous reveal and adds spatial consequences to it. 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 blind commitment is structurally similar to BattleCON, but what you are guessing about is different.

Each round every player places one card face down onto a three-slot action mat and everyone reveals at once. That card’s number sets your initiative for the round, with lower acting earlier, and returns as your energy two rounds later when the card slides off.

So you are not guessing which attack is coming. You are guessing whether your opponent needs to move first right now or is quietly funding a large turn two rounds out. Player Elimination, writing after multiple plays, noted that predicting an opponent gets genuinely difficult once they have energy banked, which is the read getting harder as options widen.

The board then gives that read consequences. Attacks come in adjacent, ranged, projectile, piercing and area shapes depending on your champion’s traits, and push and pull can shove a unit into an obstruction for collision damage. Winning the initiative often means winning the right to reposition somebody before they can respond.

There is also a construction layer BattleCON does not have. Each champion has one species and two classes, and any card sharing one of those traits, plus signature cards naming it, is legal in a 24 to 40 card deck. So part of the read is knowing what your opponent chose to bring.

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

Which way to go

BattleCON remains the cleanest expression of the idea and the fastest to set up. Its roster is deep enough to last years, and matchup knowledge is the entire game.

Games like BattleCON with a board ask more of you per turn and reward a different skill, because a correct read has to be converted into a position. If the reveal is the part you love but you have started wanting somewhere to spend the advantage, that is the direction worth exploring.

Follow or back Trials of MAYA on Gamefound.