Designing UniVersus: Nouns and Verbs

UniVersus does something unique that almost no other game does, which causes design challenges that led to us introducing an entirely new card type, Backups. Before I can dive into how we landed on creating Backups, we first need to cover: nouns and verbs.

Nouns and Verbs

A quick review from English 101: nouns are people, places and things. Verbs are words used to describe actions. In thematic game design how you represent those two things is often very different. Many games center their game play around playing nouns and using verbs to interact between the nouns. There’s a lot of logic in that approach as a noun, say “Luke Skywalker,” is often very thrilling while a verb phrase, “Luke Skywalker walking down a hallway,” can be important to a story but is less compelling as a takeaway than the noun.

UniVersus creates innovative game play by turning this notion on its head: our game is largely built out of verbs (Attacks, Foundations, and Actions) with a smattering of nouns (Characters, Assets).

A quick aside on Foundations: while they stay in play permanently, much like the traditional expectation of a “noun” card, we consider Foundations to be in the verb design space. That’s because thematically Foundations are the metaphysical foundations that make up the “why” of why characters are motivated to do what they do, not a literal physical foundation. For example, Ryu training to become a fighter makes for a good foundation, helping to represent how he became who he is and why. Ryu’s headband would not be a good Foundation, but might make a fine Asset. /end aside

This creates some design challenges for our team: nouns drive a lot of excitement in games, but our game is centered around verbs. We desired finding more ways to get nouns into the game, which meant we needed to add a new card type to the game, but we had an additional complication in doing that: because drawing the right mix of Foundations and Attacks is so critical, it’s difficult to get players to play cards that aren’t one of those two card types.

Then senior designer Matt Smith asked a question: “What if players didn’t have to choose?”

Building Backups

Matt’s design proposal was a new type of card: a permanent that stayed in play in front of players, represented nouns from whatever world we visited, but that started as an Attack and transformed into the noun. This was an exciting proposal that we set about building right away, and Matt was right: it was a lot of fun getting a new type of reward for playing Attacks and it was much easier to make the decision to include the new card type because you didn’t have to sacrifice critical card slots from the Attack portion of your deck.

This version of Backups allowed us to experiment with the new card type without forcing players to choose between their Attacks or the new card type. It still leaves open space for us to experiment with cards that are only Backups, and you’ll see those in our release in August, or even different types of double-sided Backups which may or may not be currently in development.

Mental Load and Double-Sided Cards

One last note to make on these types of double-sided cards: having one side be an Attack and the other side be a Backup allows us to create very complex cards with a high mental load, but in a more consumable fashion for newer players. The reason is because having the card play out in “installments” allows us to spread the mental load out over both sides. A new player can solve the puzzle of “Should I play this Attack?” without having to solve the puzzle of, “Should I play this Backup?” A veteran player may choose to solve for both at the same time strategically, leaving us a win/win: a complex, high level play opportunity that doesn’t prevent new players from enjoying the same type of cards.

You’ll get your first chance to play with Backups in August, though that won’t be the last time you see them, or even their final form.