Unmatched (Franchise) Review – Looking at Vol. 3
Unmatched is Restoration Games’ Villainous, a continuous series of games that are interchangeable with royalty free characters from old stories and licensed IP content as well. I’ve seen box after box of Unmatched release into my local game stores but have never taken the plunge. After playing a lot at GenCon, and going home with a copy of Unmatched Vol. 3, I finally figured out what people love so much.
Simplicity is the name of the game here, but simplicity doesn’t mean boring. Unmatched is using a very basic and understandable set of rules that cross the entire franchise, so for the most part when you understand the basics of one box, you understand the basics of all the boxes. Like with other games in this vein, each character does something just a little different, and that’s where the appeal is – you don’t just need one Unmatched box; you need them all!
The ultimate goal in Unmatched is to deplete your opponents health, done through a variety of different methods. The game focuses on two key areas: strategic movement on a central board, and card play. As noted above, each character plays differently, though, so the cards I use to play as Blackbeard are drastically different from the cards I’ll play as Loki.
With all games in this style, if everyone is playing blind – that is, they don’t necessarily know what other characters can do – the game is wildly fun. In the same way, if everyone understands all the characters, the game is fun as well. It’s that weird crossover where one player understands the characters and the other doesn’t because there is a mismatch, obviously favouring the player with knowledge over the player without.
For my wife and I, this isn’t really a problem. We play this game together, we both understand the characters, and we both have an idea of what might be coming from our opponent. When I took this game outside the house to play with others, the advantage I had based on the things I knew allowed me to win every time, and that was a bit disappointing.
That said, the competitive games I’ve had of Unmatched have been really great. Unmatched is a tense experience, as you wonder what tricks your opponent might pull out of their bag…or deck of cards! Even when you know a character inside and out, you don’t know in what order those cards are going to get played, so even having knowledge is still limited by the way your opponent chooses to play the game.
This specific box comes with a nice variety of characters. Pandora is a very defensive character, and when playing against the VERY aggressive Chupacobra, the fights can be really interesting. Loki has tricks a plenty, and probably takes a skilled Unmatched player to play him well. Blackbeard doesn’t look as impressive as the other characters initially, but when his Doubloons are used well, he can start dealing significant damage out of the blue.
This release also includes two new boards to play on; Santa’s Workshop felt very random with the conveyor belt mechanism, but for me the more random the board, the more fun the game becomes as you work to manage your strategy around it.
I’ve had way more fun with Unmatched than I thought I would, and while this box was provided by Restoration Games for the purpose of this review, I’m not actively looking to add more to my collection through my favorite local game store. If you like simple to learn, hard to master experiences then this is one worth trying!
While I believe Unmatched can be played with up to 4 players, I have only played the two player variant!
Article By Adam Roffel
