On Difficulty, Complexity, and UVS’s New Player Problem
by Pippa
What makes a difficult game? What about a complex one? How do these interact to form a deep game? And where am I going with all of this?
Hey y'all, Pippa back and under a new banner, and today I wanted to have a little discussion around UVS, the concepts of difficulty and complexity, and the ever-present new player problem with UVS. Without further adieu, let me get into the classic Pippa experience; Explaining the concepts!
Difficulty versus Complexity
What is difficulty? Within teaching, difficulty is the amount of effort required to solve an objective, whereas within gaming it is the sum of skills required to play a game. Difficulty can be presented in the rules of the game, and the understanding and mastery of said rules. The base level of difficulty is how hard it is to know the rules in order to play the game with basic mastery, such as playing cards, and knowing what is generally going on during any given moment.
Notably, this does not finish describing difficulty, as two other important terms that I will refer to will be the skill floor and skill ceiling of a game. The floor is simply the base amount of knowledge required to play a game, whereas the ceiling is the theoretical maximum potential for skill expression within a game. It is one thing to say a game is difficult, but it is another to understand on what axis the difficulty is represented.
Take chess for example, the game is overall very simple to pick up and play, with only 6 different pieces, an 8x8 board, and a single opponent, nearly anyone can pick up and play chess quickly with a short explanation. The skill floor for chess is very low, only requiring knowledge of the rules to play. However, I doubt anyone would say chess is an easy game, as the skill ceiling of the game is titanic, allowing for supreme mastery of the mechanics and ability to think forward into the future, and focus on the complexity of the game.
So what is complexity? If difficulty is the effort to accomplish a task or the knowledge of how to play a game, complexity is instead how the game forces you to think within its bounds. Complexity is the mental stack, keeping track of the gamestate, and the number of calculations you make during a game. If difficulty is knowing the rules of chess, complexity is understanding board states, problem solving, and forward thinking that gives it the skill ceiling it is known for. In this sense, the difficulty or rules knowledge of the game makes up the skill floor, while the complexity represents the ceiling.
This goes along with depth, or the number of meaningful decisions a player has any specific instance. While complexity are the lines of thinking you need for a game, depth is the specific thinking that goes into a decision within the moment. If difficulty is knowing what the pieces do, complexity is the ability to recognize board states, with depth being able to pick the correct move for the specific scenario.
Difficulty and Complexity within TCGs
Games are hard. For ingrained card gamers, this statement often sounds like hyperbole, but stepping back and taking an objective view, card games can quite easily overwhelm a person’s mental stack, though this gets resolved as the player gains more experience and practice juggling the information presented within an average game of their preferred TCG. In this section, I want to break down some examples of difficulty, complexity, and depth within various games to illustrate the variances between games, and what makes UVS so different from other games at a fundamental level. Strap in, as it is time for some yapping!
Magic the Gathering is the progenitor of trading card games, and most games can have their roots traced back in some form or another to MtG. At inception, MtG was arguably not very difficult, while it had moderate depth and some amount of interesting complexity with the power level of some of the cards available in the early days. Overall however, the cards were simple, the gameplay was straightforward, and the complexity was manageable if bland at times.
Since then, the system hasn’t changed significantly, however the complexity of effects printed has been refined over the last 30 years, leading to an indirect increase in the skill floor as more knowledge is required to resolve more complex effects. Mechanics have been introduced, keywords defined, and designers have frankly cooked, leading to more complexity, without significantly disrupting the skill floor needed to play the game.
Expanding on this, with greater complexity usually comes greater depth. One of the greater shifts in design philosophy has been expanding the ways for players to generate mana and card advantage, the two fundamental resources within MtG. This naturally increases the depth of the game, through being able to interact with the system in a wider variety of ways and simply increasing the number of meaningful actions you can make during a game.
Let’s shift over to Pokémon, one of the other largest TCGs out there, and break down its difficulty/complexity/depth. From the beginning Pokémon shifts the dynamic of its relation to resources within the game. Playing cards is (mostly) free, with the gate to playing more cards being primarily focused on timing, with Pokémon requiring a turn in play before being able to evolve into stronger forms, or only being able to attach one energy per turn.
From a difficulty perspective, it has more varied mechanics, such as evolution, no “resources” required to playing cards, with the resource requirements being attached to executing effects rather than playing cards. This leads to a naturally higher floor than its predecessor MtG, though the skill in Pokémon is more centered around being able to execute your gameplan rather than interacting with your rival, given Pokémon's limited forms of player interaction.
From a complexity standpoint, Pokémon's biggest hurdle in the early days and especially continuing into the modern era, is the number of cards you can see during a turn. Pokémon is hyper-consistent, with many effects to search your deck or draw additional cards, leading to seeing an overall greater percentage of your deck during a game, giving a ton of depth within the moment-to-moment gameplay. Learning sequencing is a huge part of Pokémon, and where most of the depth of the game comes from, though as with MtG, the game gets easier to execute the more reps you have with it.
One of the biggest factors in driving down Pokemon’s difficulty is the fact that your rival doesn’t get to interact with you on your own turn, letting you focus purely on your play. Additionally, cards resolve one at a time, further leading to a lower skill floor compared to games with a “stack” mechanic, such as MtG or Yu-Gi-Oh. Both of these help ease the introduction into the game, though it comes at the cost of making the game often play out like solitaire, where you care solely about your decks gameplan as there is minimal interaction between players.
Now for the last of the big TCG mainstays, Yu-Gi-Oh has a strange relationship with difficulty and complexity. From a base rules standpoint, YGO has several unique mechanics such as the extra deck being a secondary card resource while also housing many gameplay mechanics, to trap cards presenting hidden information. On the surface it is relatively simple, you have monsters and the bigger one wins combat, while you have spells and traps in aiding your gameplan, however the extra deck adds a gigantic amount of information to your mental stack. It houses up to 15 cards, each with unique play requirements and conditions, and you can effectively dive into it at any point in your turn.
YGO’s difficulty not only stems from these unique mechanics, but compounds due to the complexity of the game. YGO, like every card game, implements power creep, however YGO has gone in a direction of more and more text on cards, leading to cards that are laden with conditions, timings, and effects to resolve. While everyone loves to point to Nirvana High Paladin as a prime example of YGO’s text bloat, I would like to present a different example: Dinowrestler Pankratops.
What Pankratops does is simple in during the game, it can play itself for free and then sacrifice itself to destroy an opponent’s monster. However, all of the language used to convey these effects is home to three differing conditions, two costs, and two effects, so despite being simple in terms of how it plays, it is still a complex card to resolve. As a note, Pankratops was released in 2018, with a more modern example being Kashtira Fenrir, which fulfills a similar niche and was released in 2022.
This example is not to say “YGO bad because of too much text”, but to show the amount of complexity present within the average YGO card, BECAUSE of the text. Ignoring YGO’s rules, cards simply are difficult to decipher, raising the difficulty of the game through card design. This isn’t to say that old YGO cards were simpler as there are plenty of examples contradicting that, however much of the difficulty of YGO stems from the choices made within the card design of the game, rather than the base rules of the game.
As an additional example, for both MtG and Pokémon, reading the card usually explains the card, however for many YGO cards this is not the case. YGO is rife with deck search effects, card A that fetches piece B which fetches C and so on. The card velocity of the game combined with unintuitive play lines make it exceptionally hard for players to figure out what is happening within any given game, and the unique interactions with how cards interact with game mechanics makes card evaluation nebulous.
Where YGO shines however is its complexity and depth. At a high level, YGO is about setting up interaction for your opponent to deal with, and then trying to play through that interaction. It is a highly skill-testing game in terms of sequencing and effect timing, and is where YGO stands out among its peers. The moment-to-moment gameplay is very involved, where every decision is important
Difficulty and Complexity in UVS
So now you may ask, “Pippa, I love the discussion and all, but where does UVS fit into this?” to which I answer, UVS is a pretty unique game. It is vastly different from most other popular TCGs, and unfortunately this works to its detriment, but I am getting ahead of myself. Before discussing the difficulty of the game broadly, I would like to take a short example of why I believe UVS to be the game with one of the highest floors in the TCG space.
Let’s try to play a card in UVS. You declare it, make a check, and from there the player is met with a tall task; having to count. The premise is simple, you just have to make sure the orange number on the card you’re playing is equal to or greater than the blue number from the check. If the orange number is bigger, you then have to commit foundations equal to the difference in order to successfully play the card. But if you have cards in your card pool, the card you’re originally attempting to play gets bonus difficulty to it, modifying the potential number of resources needed to pass the check.
Compared to other games, this is a pretty convoluted way to simply play cards. Magic has a counting cost associated with casting spells in their mana cost, however that number doesn’t change, and your limited resources help limit the number of cards you can play in any given turn. Pokemon and YGO are even easier, as there is no inherent cost with playing a card, you just simply do it and execute the effect.
Let me expand on this further. Once a card is played in most games, the effect resolves and you continue on with your turn (let’s ignore stacks and chains for a moment). For UVS, when you attempt to play an attack, the game enters a sub-game of playing abilities on the attack and on your stage and moving through the three steps of resolving an attack. In this sense, the Enhance Step of UVS is analogous to the stack of MtG or chains in YGO, just slightly different. UVS is “simpler” in the terms of enhances often being easy to resolve, however the frequency at which players engage with this part of the game is frequent, leading to players having to both resolve forms during the combat phase, and resolving effects during attacks.
These two “modes” of the game form the core of UVS, and once you get the hang of it, the actual difficulty of the game isn’t too bad. These two clashing modes of gameplay however makes it difficult to engage new players, as UVS has a unique way of playing cards combined with the long attack sequence making resolving attacks, the primary “gameplay” of UVS, unintuitive to most audiences.
This is both why I believe UVS has a high skill floor as a barrier of entry into the game, despite it not being that bad once players have gotten used to the mechanics. UVS has a lot of complexity built into the game mechanics, from playing cards, to resolving attacks, to sequencing turns. This makes UVS both difficult and complex from a fundamental rules perspective, opposed to other TCGs within the space.
This also doesn’t account for effects that drive complexity within the game. Cards like Emerge Victorious, I Am Here, and Nick Ragan obviously are a pain to resolve and increase complexity within the game, but I don’t believe to an unhealthy amount. I believe that UVS is a complex game to begin with, and furthermore that printing “simple” cards does not solve the complexity issue of the game, as it is built into the game mechanics.
Printing “simple cards” doesn’t lower the barrier of entry for new players as much as some may think, as the game itself is hard, and while simple cards can make resolving the game easier, they don’t reduce the floor of the game to make it more approachable. This is what I believe is a common misconception with this game, and I would like to show it off with two examples; Attack on Titan set 1, versus Attack on Titan set 3.
Attack on Titan 1 was certainly a set. Littered with blank cards and draft chaff to boost the number of cards within the set, not only is it atrocious to find a playset of higher rarity cards due to the increased set size, but many of these cards are simply bad, and won’t see play, leading to much of the set feeling like bulk. This isn’t to say every card in the set is bad, in fact I like most of the well designed ones! High-Velocity Slice, Determined Advance, and Besiege are well designed cards that have plenty of homes, but on the flipside we got cards like Roar, Git Movin’, and Night Terrors, blank or effectively blank cards. The good ones are still good, but the opposite end of the spectrum ends up unplayable.
Moving onto Attack on Titan set 3, the highs of the set feel much the same, however many of the throwaway un/common cards have vastly better design overall. The attacks have interesting effects, such as Anchor Toss, and Lethal Rending, while foundations are powerful or do something interesting, like Planned Coup or Difficult Decision. The lows of the set are drastically higher than AoT1, while it maintains the same highs.
I want to point this out due to AoT1 being pitched as a good introduction point for new players due to the reduced complexity, but printing cards with few/no effects doesn’t meaningfully reduce the complexity of UVS. Most effects are reasonably easy to resolve, with the simplest being stat pumps/reductions, and these add complexity in tracking the game state, however that is minimal at most.
Much of the complexity within UVS from card design is also expounded by the stage, where you have an ever-growing board of cards you need to pay attention to, adding additional cards to the mental stack in a game that has incredibly high card velocity. The issue of UVS’s mental stack has been addressed by the designers so I won’t touch on it too much, but it is something to keep in mind while discussing the complexity of the game.
This is all to say that I believe that UVS as a game has difficulty problem at a fundamental level, and printing “boring” cards won’t solve this issue as it is at the game mechanics level, opposed to the card design level. Printing “simple” effects does not make resolving attacks easier, nor does it take away from the constant math that, while easy, pervades the entire game of UVS.
So? What Now?
Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to really remedy this issue without significant overhauls to the game engine of UVS. And that is not a bad thing. I love UVS, I love the difficulty, the complexity, the depth, the game flow and pace, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. UVS is a niche game, and it always has been, and honestly? I don’t think I mind that. What I believe is that UVSG needs to realize this difficulty problem and instead of trying to solve it via design, is lean into it.
UVSG has tried all sorts of ways of attracting new players, though they haven’t always stuck. The biggest draw to the game at a surface level is the number of unique and fun IPs within the game, with the meat being the highly engaging gameplay with a high ceiling for mastery. The biggest hurdle however is overcoming the initial difficulty floor required in the game, and I honestly don’t have an answer for that.
UVS is like a fighting game, literally. Not just from the mechanics, but from the approachability. While daunting to approach, it is a highly rewarding experience to engage with and the mastery of the game keeps me coming back, even after my breaks. I believe it is good that a game with some amount of mastery curve is available, and I hope that UVSG can embrace that going forward.
