Arguably harder to write about than My Life With Master, I came across a reference to it while reading around MLWM before writing it up. In some ways more like a board game, Universalis is essentially a structured way to create and tell a story in a group.
There is no GM, at the start of the game each player gets a number of coins which each spends in turn to establish facts about the story. Once play begins coins are spent to introduce or take charge of components (characters, locations, props) and assign them traits. Players can spend coins to challenge each other and dice are used to resolve complications, i.e. when there is a contested outcome. Coins are won from the resolution of complications or minimally refreshed at the start of each new scene. In this way a story unfolds.
It looks like a really carefully considered system, the rules come in at just over 100 pages.
I’d really like to try it and I’m surprised I’ve only come across it now. It looks like a potentially useful creative tool when working in groups, and there are many lovely aspects to it, the advice on adding traits and setting up scenes for propelling a story towards where you want it to go look like good advice for writing generally. The pdf I downloaded is from 2002 and there was an updated edition in 2006, but the publisher website is sadly defunct. Indeed I could not actually purchase it anywhere, which is a real shame as they really deserve the cash.
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