About the Massive-Verse Team Up Expansion

Hello everyone! I’m here today to talk about the Team-Up mode, which is a brand-new exciting way to play— with 4 players! Long-time readers of my old design blogs would recall that the game actually started off as a 4 player game for 2 teams of 2. This product allowed us to resurrect that original design as a fun new optional mode!

1.) Each Team Assembled 5 Characters
Let’s jump into a quick version of the way Team-Up works. In Team-Up, you and your teammate will select a roster of 5 Paragons to play as. The Massive-Verse box comes with 8 Paragons, and the Team-Up box comes with an additional 2 (until we add more from stretch goals!) so that you have the required minimum total of 10, 5 for each team. The Team-Up box is of course cross-compatible with all existing Pocket Paragons content, but we wanted to make sure newcomers to the game would have enough characters to play the new mode!

2.) Select Teamwork Abilities
After you’ve selected your teams, each team will select 5 Teamwork abilities. These are a brand-new type of ability card, featuring a snazzy new pink handshake ability icon. Each of the 5 Teamwork abilities you select will start face-up on the table, ready to be claimed. How do you get them? I’ll cover that in a bit.

3.) 4 Player Simultaneous Play
Once each team has their 5 Paragons and their 5 Teamwork abilities, the game begins. Each player picks 1 of their available Paragons, leaving the remaining 3 off to the side. From here, you duel the opponent seated across from you. All 4 players secretly select their abilities, reveal them and resolve them at the same time.

4.) Match Abilities to Gain Team Up Cards!
After you and your teammate reveal your abilities (which is when they’re turned face-up, but before any abilities begin to resolve), check the two ability symbols your team played this round. If those two symbols match the two Ready symbols on one of your Teamwork abilities, then one of you gets to ready that ability, putting it into their hand to be played on a future turn. Gaining extra abilities is always good, so you want to coordinate with your teammate to grab up these new cards! Use teamwork cards to help your ally recover from a losing fight or use it to have them push a specific advantage. It's also a great way to adjust to a particular match up!

5.) Recovering used Team Up Cards
After a Teamwork card becomes played, it becomes exhausted as normal, going to the discard pile of the player who played it. When that played plays Rest, any of their exhausted Teamwork cards go back to the shared unlock zone instead of going back to their hand. From there, you can earn the Teamwork cards again by playing the matching symbols.

6.) Defeat all 5 enemy Paragons to win!
When a character is defeated, that player chooses one of their team’s remaining characters to be their new character and comes into the game fresh. Their opponent stays at the same health and energy they had before. Any Teamwork abilities a dead character was holding go back to being stored. If a character dies and they don’t have any new characters left in reserve, that team loses immediately! In the rare case that this happens to both teams during the same round, the remaining surviving 2 players fight each other until one team is victorious.

That covers the basics of the Team-Up mode, but there are extra ways to play 2v2! The Team-Up box comes with two identical sets of Teamwork cards so each team can pick their favorites, but an alternative game mode has both teams drafting cards between only one set of Teamwork abilities, while also drafting their characters at the same time! It’s a lot more involved (and not recommended for your first time), but it adds an extra thick layer of strategy on top that I think you’ll really enjoy.

Thanks for checking out this supermassive new product! If you have any questions about the way the new game mode works, we’re having daily discussions about everything in our new Kickstarter in the Solis Game Studio Discord as well as the Massive-Verse Discord, come join us! — Brian McKay

* Teamup mode is still in development. All cards and game rules are subject to change.