2024 was an unprecedented year for UniVersus and game design. We set out the most ambitious agenda in the game’s history with some specific goals in mind:

• Making the game more accessible to new players while keeping it exciting for our long-term fans

• Working with more licensing partners than ever before

• Reducing the amount of turn-2 kills we saw in games

• Crafting formats with matches that end in a reasonable timeframe

• Running experiments, learning from them, and adjusting based on what we learned

Improving Accessibility

The biggest feedback we received from our game stores, distributors, and retail partners leading into 2024 was that the game was too high on the complexity scale to appeal to a wide variety of consumers. Their ask was to streamline designs so more players could adopt the game, and to make it easier to teach. This was valuable feedback, but as players ourselves it was important to us to keep the soul of UniVersus true for its core audience. As we settled into a three-set arc of design in the world of Attack on Titan, finding solutions that split this difference was our primary goal.

We landed on a number of new mechanics and ideas for the world of Attack on Titan:

• The “Blitz” timing keyword

• The “Attuned” symbols

• A new card type in “Backups”

• Increasing the frequency of reminder text, particularly on lower rarity cards

• Revamping the flow of card information on cards

• Lowering the quantity of text, on average, for lower rarity cards

• A focus on reducing “mental load” in card designs

• Introducing more flavor and story elements through things like flavor text

The end result of some of our largest experiments in this space were successful. Attack on Titan: Battle for Humanity moved more booster boxes than any set in the UVS Games era, and our survey of hundreds of players cited the game design of the set as the #1 reason players were interested in the product. Overall, I’m happy with the success we had in trying to balance a complicated game with the need to bring in new players, but we had several experiments that went less successfully.

Experiment and Adjust

In addition to mechanical changes in Attack on Titan, we also implemented non-mechanical changes to experiment with our product offerings. This type of experimentation is key to learning what works and doesn’t work for a product, and we definitely found some things that didn’t work for UniVersus in 2024.

Attack on Titan: Battle for Humanity was the largest set we’ve ever made as a company, clocking in at nearly 300 cards. This was intended to help set up a “Spotlight Constructed” format that would allow players to play all three sets for things like qualifiers and have a fully fleshed out format. However, the qualifier seasons moved in a different direction, reducing the utility of the AOT Spotlight Constructed format and making the task of collecting an entire set of Battle for Humanity more daunting. Set size was the #1 reason cited by players in our survey as to what they didn’t like about this set, a risk we knew was possible when we made the decision to expand the set size. To mitigate that risk in the initial experiment we had accepted building one set that size and then not building any others until we had feedback from our community. For now we don’t have plans to build a large set like this in the near term, though we might if the right world or product came along that made sense to do so in the far future.

A smaller experiment we tried was character rarity. The personalities of people’s favorite characters from a show, manga, or video game are a larger driver in the appeal of UniVersus, but the collectability of our characters is low out of the box because of their flat rarity. We added character rarity to measure how it would impact collectability, and also to help us sculpt Limited play by ensuring characters that are better fits for those formats show up more frequently in booster packs. While the latter half of that experiment was a success, and we received positive feedback on Sealed Deck play, the impact on collectability was pretty minimal. Moving forward, you’ll see us adjust to a two-tier rarity structure for characters that is less concerned with collectability and more concerned with creating fun Limited format games at prerelease.

Attack on Titan saw us experiment with including portions of our symbols in card sets instead of each of the twelve symbols. This was based on feedback we frequently heard from both the community and our local game stores that twelve symbols was daunting, particularly for new players. It also makes it challenging for designers to sculpt identities around symbols when you need to represent so many in sets that are typically in the 150-card range. For Attack on Titan, we decided to build the world around the six symbols that we felt best represented it: Air, Chaos, Death, Fire, Life, and Order. To offset the over-representation of those symbols, our other products sought to represent different symbols. However, the release of those products is quite spread out. While it’s unlikely we’ll spend three sets in a single universe any time soon, in the future we’d structure those sets to find a way to incorporate different symbols in each set or spread their releases out further to incorporate a greater variety-balance in symbols per release.

Looking Ahead

While last year was one of the most monumental in UniVersus’ history, we’re already looking ahead to 2025. The prerelease for Heroes of Exandria is just around the corner, and I’m very excited for players to get their hands on the set. Our product roadmap for 2025 provides a bit more stability and a slower pace of release which–based on feedback from our community–we feel will be a better fit for our players.

One project I’m very excited about is a revamping of our Loyalty and Rewards Systems. This effort has been months in the making, with the goal of building on the prior system’s success to provide awesome rewards for players who regularly engage in organized play and buying our products. More news to come on this exciting development later this year!

The success of last year and the coming success of this year is driven by you, our fans, and your feedback helps us decide the directions we want to move in. Thanks for being a fan, and to engage with us make sure to check out our social media channels!