Everything you need to know
The Rulebook
Mouse — one of the competitors has turned up. Reckons they haven’t got a clue what’s going on.
Then we shall tell them. That is what the desk is for.
Have you looked at it lately? Yellowy-green background, some very thick black lines, and a questionable amount of trademark infringement.
I have no idea what you are implying.
UHC. Rogan on the mic.
Entirely unique to us, Joe.
Of course it is.
The idea is simple. Enter a battle, we narrate the outcome, the winner takes the belt.
That is the whole thing, is it.
That is the whole thing.
Then why are there nine sections?
Because you keep asking questions. Try to keep up.
So where does somebody actually start?
Somebody opens a card. The doors stay open for one, three or five minutes, and anyone can put a hoodie in — as many as they like.
Anyone. No invite, no queue, no application form.
If you own a hoodie, it can be in the next fight.
And then we all stand about, do we.
The bell goes and the field starts thinning. On a big card the arena itself takes a hand first — a Cull, which removes a great many at once by whatever they have in common.
Everyone with a hat. Everyone with a beard. Whatever the building has decided it dislikes tonight.
Then it is rounds, until two are left. Those two settle it, and the last one standing takes the card.
And I want this said plainly, because people ask me. None of it is happening live, is it.
The whole fight is worked out in one go, then played to you at reading speed.
So everybody is on the same beat and nobody can refresh their way to a different result. I have tried. It does not work.
Go on then. What have I got to buy?
Nothing. Your hoodie’s own traits decide it — its class, its ink, what it is wearing. That is the entire build.
Say the next bit properly, Mouse, because nobody believes it the first time.
Nothing you buy or earn makes a hoodie harder to beat. Not levels, not prestige, not the weapon in its hand. Every card is fought on traits alone.
It was not always so. Levelling used to hand out a stat point at a time, and a hoodie at the ceiling won one hundred per cent of its fights. Four thousand of them, checked. That is not a game, that is a queue.
So a rarer one is a better one. That is what you are telling me.
No. Rarity does not touch a single number. A floor hoodie beats a grail every night of the week.
Then what am I looking for?
A different one, not a better one. Class decides most of it, and the four of them go in a circle — Builder over Collector, Collector over Flipper, Flipper over Hodler, Hodler over Builder. Ink shifts you between armoured and quick.
So the hoodie you already own beats somebody. It is a question of who turned up.
Which means a card with a pot on it is fair by construction rather than by promise. I have nothing funny to add. That is the good bit.
Somebody turns up, gets eliminated in round one, goes home. What did they get out of that?
XP. Turning up earns it, every round survived earns it, and so does finishing anywhere at all.
They came last, Mouse.
And it still counts. A win is 150 before multipliers, an elimination 30, and reversing one back onto whoever tried it 40.
40. The most satisfying number on this page and I will not be taking questions about it.
All of it multiplied by the size of the field, so winning a thousand-hoodie card is worth far more than winning an eight.
Which is there to stop three friends farming tiny cards at four in the morning. It will not stop them trying.
And where does all this end up? My wallet?
Against the hoodie. Sell it and the record goes with it.
And it costs nothing. No membership, no purchase, nothing to sign up to. Everybody is on the books from their first fight.
Fight on consecutive days and a streak multiplier climbs. Days roll over at midnight UTC, so everybody’s clock is the same one.
Here it comes. How much?
Depends which of the three you have walked into. There are only three kinds of card: free, wager, and sponsored.
Go on then. One at a time.
A free fight costs nothing and counts for everything — same records, same ladders, same belts. Most cards are these.
Start there. Next.
A wager fight carries an entry, paid in $OCH, the same for everyone on the card. Seventy-five per cent goes to the winner and twenty-five to that week’s Main Event pot.
In $OCH. Somebody asked whether they could pay in exposure. They are not on the card.
And our cut? We are being paid for this nonsense, right, Mouse?
Afraid not, Joe. We are in it for the fame alone.
The fame.
There is no cut. Every token goes back to players — three quarters tonight, a quarter on the weekly.
I am fairly sure I was told I was being paid, Mouse. Go on then. Talk wagers to me. I can take it.
Wagers run from 100 $OCH up to 1,000,000, in three bands: Suggested, Degen, Brain damage.
The last one is called Brain damage and it makes you tick a box saying you understand what you are staking. That is not decoration. The top rung is one per cent of every $OCH that will ever exist.
And the third?
A sponsored fight. Somebody puts a jackpot up and everyone else enters free. Their hoodie presents the night.
Free to enter, real money to win, and the sponsor gets me saying their number all evening. Which is the bit they are actually paying for.
And what is this I have heard about memberships?
A one-off. 1,000 $OCH, paid once, and that is that. It opens the weekly Main Event, the right to hold a belt, the shop, and every world past the free one.
And memberships are for the owner, or the hoodie, Mouse? Will somebody think of the hoodies.
The hoodie. Always the hoodie. Twenty hoodies is twenty memberships, and each one keeps its own the day you sell it.
But I can win without a membership?
You can. Enter anything, win anything, take the pot. Nobody is ever kept out of a fight.
Then what exactly am I missing out on?
A belt, a title, the shop — and the weekly, which is members only and is where the largest money of the week sits.
So a non-member is fighting for pride and the odd pot, never the big one.
Put like that, yes.
Sounds like it is best to be a member. And where does my thousand $OCH go, exactly?
The treasury, to keep the lights on. It is the only money UHC takes, which is how we can promise not to touch a pot.
You keep saying “weekly Main Event”. And a quarter of every entry goes there?
That is right, Joe. The Main Event is a special card. It is funded by 25 per cent of all the $OCH collected that week, and the winner takes the lot.
And how do I get in?
No need to sign up. Every member is entered automatically, every week.
So when you said there were three kinds of fight, you meant four. And the one you left out is the most epic.
That is right, Joe. Glad you are managing to keep up. Three that anybody can open, and one that only the house can.
And if it is a quiet week and nobody wagers anything?
Then it rolls into the next one. An empty pot never pays out, it just makes the following week bigger.
And the card itself?
Runs regardless. Every member, every week, pot or no pot — because the belt is the prize. The money is a bonus.
Hang on. That quarter comes off wagers, and you have just said the weekly is members only.
It is.
So somebody without a membership is paying into a pot they cannot win.
They are, and every card that carries a wager says so before anybody enters it. Nobody finds that out afterwards.
Fine. I would rather be told than discover it in a fortnight.
And it is an ordinary numbered card with a flag on it. Same sequence, same record. UHC 332 might be a Main Event and UHC 333 an ordinary Friday.
Its winner takes the Heavyweight.
Which brings us neatly to the belts.
Belts. How many, and can I have one?
Four titles, and every one of them is taken off somebody in a fight.
So we get regular changes of the belts? That does not sound annoying for the engraver at all.
The Welterweight changes fight to fight — it goes to whoever won the last card. The Heavyweight can only change once a week, because it belongs to the weekly.
And the other two?
The unicorns. The Sponsor’s and the Undisputed.
Tell me more.
The Sponsor’s can only be won on a sponsored card. No sponsor, no belt — it sits exactly where it is until somebody puts a jackpot up.
And the real prize? The belt that was built for Rogan?
It was not built for you, Joe. The Undisputed is reserved for a very particular sort of night.
Go on.
You have to hold the Heavyweight and the Welterweight at once. Win the weekly, then go and win an ordinary card before somebody takes that one off you.
Which cannot be done in a night. That is the hardest thing here by a distance.
That is right, Joe. The Undisputed is for a special type of hoodie.
And for the rest of us?
Then four No. 1 contenders, one for each class — Builder, Collector, Flipper, Hodler.
Those are rankings, not titles. Nobody took them off anybody. Top of your class on XP and it is yours until somebody passes you, which they will, while you are asleep.
Reach level 25 — around a hundred cards — and you can prestige: reset to one, keep the rank, and open gear nobody below you can hold.
And it buys you no advantage whatsoever. Not a single point. It is the loudest eliminations in the game and everybody knowing you did the hundred cards.
These worlds. Is it just a paint job?
No. The promoter picks a world and a room in it — The Hood, Deep Space, Medieval, The Deep, The Gods — and it decides the language, the venues and the armoury.
The world is not a skin. It changes the language, the venues and the armoury — you do not carry a frozen baguette onto Olympus, and I will not describe it if you try.
54 weapons across the 5 of them, and every one has its own eliminations written for it.
And what does a weapon actually do for me?
About four eliminations in ten name the weapon that landed them.
That is it. That is the whole thing. It does not help you win, it decides how I describe you winning.
Unlocks let you present a card in a world. They never decide who may enter one.
And whatever anybody has unlocked, the card is still open to the lot of you. An unlock has never kept a single hoodie out of a fight and it never will.
Why are there three of us up here?
I call the action. You tell them what it meant.
And a different hoodie guests on the desk every card, picked out of the collection, with a personality worked out from its own traits. Some of them have a fighter in the card and stop pretending to be neutral about it.
We know the record. If a hoodie won a card eleven weeks ago, or had a night nobody has beaten since, it gets said.
And the quotes? Whose are those?
Hood Talk. When a hoodie has put words on chain, we read them out. Verbatim. They are the only lines here that nobody in this booth wrote.
They are also, frequently, the worst ones. That is not our fault and I want it on the record.
Right. This is the one that matters, so I will ask it properly. How do I know you did not just pick the winner?
Every card is decided by a seed. Before the doors open we publish a fingerprint of that seed, and we cannot change it afterwards without the fingerprint no longer matching.
So it is fixed before anybody knows who is entering.
When the card resolves, the seed itself is published with the field and the version of the rules. Feed those three back in and you get the same fight, elimination for elimination.
Byte for byte, on any machine. There is no live rolling, no server deciding anything as it goes, and nothing anybody can lean on halfway through.
The fight and the commentary also draw from separate streams, so what we say can never change who wins.
Which sounds like housekeeping and is not. It means somebody adding a new joke to my script cannot alter a single result, and a card from a year ago still replays exactly as it happened.
Right. Before anybody commits. What are we still pretending about?
6 things. I will take them in the order you would hit them.
The entry contract. No $OCH moves. A wager or a jackpot is a number on a card until it is built and tested.
Membership. Nobody is being charged, and every record still counts.
The shop. Nothing can be bought and no XP can be spent.
The weekly Main Event. Members are meant to be entered automatically and the card is meant to run every week whether or not anybody wagered. Neither happens yet — there is no scheduler.
Prestige. The ceiling is real and levels stop there, but nothing can reset yet and no rank is recorded.
Unlocks. Every world, venue and weapon is open to everybody for the beta. What the beta hands out is reset when it ends; records are not.
So everybody is being recorded and nobody is being charged, which is the generous way round to get it wrong. Go and put a hoodie in something.