One of my favorite pastimes on the playground growing up was having heated debates with my friends about which of our favorite TV or video game characters would win in a fight. While it’s been a few decades since those days on the swingset, pitting two individuals from different properties against one another in a deathmatch is no less relevant today – just look at games like Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Magic: The Gathering. One trading card game has been doing it far longer. It’s called UniVersus, and the team at UVS Games has recently released the final set in their Attack on Titan line – Apocalypse – featuring cards and characters from the final arc of the manga and anime. At last, we can find out if Eren Yeager, in his final form, can take on Godzilla or the various members of Critical Role’s Vox Machina.
UniVersus Attack on Titan: Apocalypse
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For those unfamiliar with UniVersus, previously known as “UFS – Universal Fighting System”, it’s a card game akin to games like Magic: The Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh, but whose identity is based around creating wild cross-over fights. Players construct decks, picking a Character to lead their deck, which also dictates how much life they start with and their maximum hand size. UniVersus’ mechanics are centered around checks that players make to play their various kinds of cards, from attacks to other resources. Each card has a challenge value on it that must be met or exceeded for the card to be successfully played, requiring the player to flip the card on top of their deck and compare its check value against the challenge value of the action to be played.
Successes allow the action to be taken, such as attacking your opponent, while a failure ends your turn. A player’s turn continues until either they pass or fail one of these checks, with each subsequent check increasing the challenge value. It’s an interesting system, and adds an extra element of tension with every check from the top of your deck. However, it can be a bit overwhelming at times, especially when you get to blocking attacks, which have their own set of similar checks to deal with. UniVersus as a whole, I feel, is one of the more complex card games out there on the market today.
This latest set is focused around the final arc of the Attack of Titan series. It continues to build on the previous sets that UVS released – Battle for Humanity and Origins of Power. Much like those other sets, Apocalypse retains the unique manga-esque card art, with most of the artwork framed in manga panels, with brand new artwork done by series creator Hajime Isayama. While his art style may not be everyone’s cup of tea, I personally prefer the art of the anime more, but there is no denying that it is neat to have these unique prints included in the set.
From a gameplay standpoint, not much sets Apocalypse apart from the other AoT sets UVS has released in the past year, but that isn’t really a bad thing, as I’ve enjoyed the previous sets quite a bit. I am especially fond of the double-sided Titan cards that allow characters to shift from their human form into their Titan form during the game, allowing for deeper strategies and tense moments in my games, and it feels just as good here in this final set as it did in the first. I have my fingers crossed that the team will find ways to incorporate this feature in future non-AoT sets.
Coming in at over 180 cards, Apocalypse offers players roughly the same amount of new cards as the previous Origins of Power set did, so unfortunately, if you were hoping for another large set like the titanic (pun intended) Battle for Humanity and its 300+ list, you’re out of luck. It is a bit of a bummer that there aren’t more cards. One feeling, though that I couldn’t escape as I looked through this set, was how it felt more like a set aimed more at collectors than at players. Maybe it’s just my imagination, resulting from the marketing focus on the new Isayama artwork and special chrome cards, but I feel like with the set’s release, and even before, I heard more about those parts of this release than specifics on new cards or abilities of the set. To Apocalypse’s credit, the cards are all very neat and the chrome cards are beautiful, but for prospective new players, I don’t know what they could really learn about the set from a quick google search about specifics outside of “look, new art” which leads into the biggest issue that continues to hound UniVersus as a whole – learning resources.
Again, this is a complicated game and on the spectrum of simple to complex card games, I would put UniVersus somewhere around 3 out of 4 mark. Even after dabbling in the game for the past year or two, there are still a number of areas – resource symbols for example – that seemingly make little sense to me. To the team’s credit, they realize the game has an onboarding problem. I’ve played Magic a long time, so the idea of color identity, the idea that a specific color is tied to a style of gameplay, is something that makes sense to me, and symbols are, in essence, the UniVersus version of this idea. But UniVersus has 12 symbols, with abstract things like “All”, “Good”, and “Chaos” as just a few examples. I haven’t progressed far past the idea of just using the same symbols as the character who is leading my deck, but I wish the learning resources available did far more to help explain the systems, or were presented better.
While some resources are available, examples such as the phase breakdown and play-by-play of a turn are walls of text without a single accompanying image to help. The symbols guide features outdated card art and symbol designs, and the currently available basic “How to Play” video that teaches the most basic concepts of the game doesn’t touch on half of the card types that the game uses or even mention those resource symbols. In fact, they are omitted completely even from the art on the cards used in the demonstration. Thankfully, various content creators have published resources that potential new players can watch to learn the game, but the bright side of things is that they know that this is an issue and are working to address it, slowly but surely. I enjoy my time when I play, but finding good information on how to play or build decks in this game is so hard to come by that it makes UniVersus a hard sell to my card-game-playing friends.
