Designing UniVersus: Resource Symbols
Bill Stark
Today we’re talking about Resource Symbols: the good, the challenging, and some new ways in which we’re utilizing those symbols in design moving forward. The twelve primary resource symbols in UniVersus (we’ll discuss the Infinity symbol in a future article) are:
Air
All
Chaos
Death
Earth
Evil
Fire
Good
Life
Order
Void
Water
What Symbols Do Well
Resource symbols help provide identities to mechanics and cards in UniVersus. A Life card should feel different from a Death card, and the way we design Life cards should reflect that. Put another way: resource symbols provide identities players can express themselves through gameplay and deckbuilding.
But symbols aren’t just for flavor and expression: they’re also critical for defining deckbuilding by providing guide rails to players to identify what goes together to make up a deck. If your favorite character features the Fire symbol, you know you should be looking for other Fire symbol cards to play with that character. Because deckbuilding in card games is one of the most skill-intensive areas of play, symbols have extra significance for helping to smooth this experience and reducing the number of players who leave UniVersus when they reach the “build a deck” phase of the experience.
What Symbols Don’t Do Well
The biggest challenge we’ve heard from players engaging with UniVersus’ resource symbols is that there are too many of them. As we’ve talked about before, mental load is a double-edged sword in game design: too much and players abandon the game feeling overwhelmed, but too little and players abandon the game for being too boring. With twelve symbols, players were facing an early hurdle in trying to assess what each of them was about, a challenge we wanted to address.
So many symbols provided challenges for game designers too: there are HUNDREDS of potential combinations of symbols, making it difficult to define the personality of a Death-Fire-Life card versus a Death-Evil-Fire card. It’s also difficult to build characters that could cover each potential combination of symbols due to the large quantity of mixes that exist.
Looking Ahead
To help address these challenges with symbols we experimented with some changes in symbol expression that will start rolling out in our next booster set. Moving forward, each product we make will include some, but potentially not all, of the resource symbols. We’re making this adjustment with a few goals in mind:
We want to continue easing onboarding for players joining UniVersus
We want to do a stronger job of reflecting the flavor of different worlds through their symbol representation; an Air/Chaos/Death/Fire/Life/Order world should feel like a different place than an All/Earth/Evil/Good/Void/Water world
We want to flesh out the individual identities of symbols by putting a bigger focus on specific symbols product-to-product
We came to this decision after significant amounts of playtesting to understand the impact of gameplay with limited symbol representation. One concern we had was an overrepresentation of some symbols that are included in several products in print together. How would that impact things? We saw two things in design that helped shape our thoughts in this space:
Our tournament data showed that frequently one or two symbols were already over represented in gameplay data because of power levels on cards like Back Alley Haymaker and Younger Toguro
Our increased product line could allow us to represent all symbols across many products, even if any individual product only presented a few
Over the past year, we’ve introduced the Challenger Series, a new deck product line that allows us to visit more worlds. We’ve also had some partnerships, like with Spy x Family: Code White or our upcoming Suicide Squad ISEKAI cards, that have allowed us to add additional cards to the world of UniVersus. The outcome has been new avenues for introducing cards into the game, and a chance to allow us to accomplish our goals: introducing an individual product focused on several symbols but having enough of those products to build broader formats like Standard with representation of all symbols. You’ve started to see that as we’ve rolled out Challenger decks featuring some symbols, and you’ll see it continue in August as we roll out our first booster product that highlights some, but not all, symbols.
Closing Thoughts
This new representation of symbols in UniVersus doesn’t mean an end to the symbols players know and love; it’s simply a new expression of them. All 12 symbols remain in the game, and we will likely see all 12 appear together in a product at the same time in the future. We’re excited about the new opportunities this expression of symbols gives us, and we’re very excited for you to get your hands on them soon!