Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
By almost every metric, the latest Unmatched Adventures set, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, is an improvement on its predecessor.
Now, that’s quite some feat, given Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze’s impressive achievement. It turned the competitive Unmatched system into a cooperative experience and did it with style. I gave it 4 out of 5 stars just a few months ago, and I stand by that score.
But Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is the better game and the better experience. I’m going to use Tales to Amaze as a comparison throughout this review, not because it’s lacking, but to show how this new version builds on it.
Raise some shell
For the record, I am fairly indifferent to the cowabunga-ing Turtles. My 9-year old son recently asked me who has what weapon and I had to shrug and promise we’d look it up when we got home. They like pizza, they hang about with people whose names are months, and they wear colourful masks. (Why do they need masks, how many other humanoid turtles are wandering about New York?) Both their teacher and their villain are named after processes of making small fragments, but I couldn’t tell you which was the good one.
My praise for this game doesn’t come from a sense of nostalgia, any biases instead stem from already liking the Unmatched system and its cooperative experience. And broadly, the experience is the same here as with Tales to Amaze. This isn’t likely to convert anyone not sold the first time round. The leaps forward aren’t giant-for-mankind types, just a series of small steps that demonstrate the Restoration team’s growth.
So what’s new?
Nothing. This is still a cooperative box where one to four players play as one of four heroes to defeat one of two villains and their one to six minions. Each villain remains tied to its specific scenario, and winning the game involves a combination of positioning, timing, heroics in half shells and luck to defeat them before their evil schemes come to fruition.
Big picture, everything is the same. When it comes to the details, however, everything is improved.
The scenarios are more interesting. The random bridges and fields are gone, replaced by villains that have character and actual plans. It isn’t just that the vague scenarios of Tales to Amaze left me a little cold, it’s that the story and mechanics interlock better here.
Shredder wants to take control of New York, spreading his foot soldiers about the place to do so. As the heroic reptiles, you dance about the board effortlessly dispatching these irritants on your way to confront the proper baddies. The chore of getting rid of the foot soldiers supports the narrative without getting in the way and is an interesting puzzle to boot. The movement and positioning is fluid and engaging, the city feels like it’s under threat. Rather than a fallen bridge simply removing a path or fields just filling up with random aliens, a city district being overrun actually means something. The board matters here in a way it never truly did before.
Meanwhile Krang is messing about opening a portal to Dimension X. I’ll be honest, the whys and wherefores of who this villain is and what he’s trying to do went over my head, but I can absolutely get behind a tightly knotted arena with a spreading border between dimensions and switches to help stop it. The changing board effects, alongside the traps and Die of Ultimate Destruction combine to give the feeling that an evil plan is being carried out, even if I’ve no idea of the reason for it. It’s silly and over the top and it really works.
There’s a sense of complete coherence with the scenarios and maps that brings their villains to life. In retrospect, the scenarios of Tales to Amaze feel like timer mechanisms dressed up.
That coherence extends to the included heroes. I griped in my review of the original Adventures game that the heroes felt completely random, a disjointed group of individuals rather than people who’d work together. For all that they’re great heroes by themselves, as a team they’re forgettable. It was the players around the table who felt like the team, not the miniatures on the board.
That isn’t an issue here. The shared history and narratives mean that the heroes feel as relevant as the villains and scenarios. Their card art is distinct, but each deck features plenty of callbacks to the other Turtles in a way that showcases that they’re a team. I still couldn’t tell you which is which – they’re all turtle-humanoids waving weapons – but they’re excellent. The purple one invents things, and gaining permanent abilities throughout the game makes you feel special. The orange one restricts your hand size but ensures you’re drawing cards at every opportunity: it’s nice to have a constant stream of cards that you have to use or else lose. The blue one’s bonus move is great, being able to shunt anyone else about feels like you’re the leader of the team. And the red one is just a beast and an absolute blast to play. ‘Relentless’ might just be my favourite card in the whole Unmatched series, and his card art, all moody greys with splashes of red, is phenomenal.
These are great heroes. The art is outstanding, the miniatures are excellent and the unique powers are a lot of fun. I’ve played each of them several times and I’ve not had a duff experience yet.
Both maps are excellent too. I enjoy Unmatched, but I’ll be the first to admit I don’t play it to the level where maps immediately stand out for me. But my first plays had me wanting to play again just to mess about on the maps. Again, these feel like actual places, bringing their stories and battles to life. They’re also less muted than most Unmatched maps, which helps. This is a vibrant experience.
I will say that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles feels a little easier. I’ve won more than I’ve lost, which I couldn’t say with its predecessor. To combat this there are the allies and henchmen. In Tales to Amaze the equivalent was the Amazing Events deck where 1-3 cards were drawn at the start of the game to tweak the rules. Which was fine but it acted from the outside of the game, awkwardly bolting on extra difficulty.
The allies and henchmen are different, they interlock with the rest of the game, making sense narratively. By clever positioning you can bring friendly cards into the initiative deck to harm the baddies or take out their henchmen. It’s another incentive to move about the map; it feels natural and occasionally thrilling.
Never pay full price for late pizza
In all, I have three complaints. One is unfair, one is a might-be-a-me-thing and one is a genuine gripe. We’ll go in that order.
The unfair one: I’m less inclined to swap in other heroes. This is such a cohesive set that I don’t know how much I’m going to use other heroes from other sets. I just can’t see myself pitting Shakespeare or Little Red against Shredder or Krang. It’s an unfair criticism because it just shows that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is doing its job very well indeed. And bringing other characters in for competitive play isn’t an issue at all.
The might-be-a-me-thing one: The minions are a little forgettable. To be fair, I don’t know any of them and they’re all decent enemies, but none of them stand out mechanically in the way that the Loveland Frog, Skunk Ape or Ant Queen did. A couple simply feel like variants of what’s gone before, dropping tokens around the board to hinder the players. I do enjoy how Slash gets more powerful as the game goes on, but that’s the only minion I can remember both their name and how they behave. Like I say, possibly just a me thing coming from not knowing the characters. I get that a massive Tarantula wanders about leaving webs about the place to slow heroes down, I have no idea what a humanoid fly scientist is up to with ‘Mousers’.
Ok, finally, the genuine gripe: The box is too big. It’s designed to house the deluxe tokens and the hero decks for Shredder and Krang, but not the Extra Toppings miniatures. There are two layers to the insert (which couple be better formed in a couple of places), with large empty spaces and a foam pad to keep everything in place. Even if you have the deluxe tokens, that foam pad stays there. Having a second plastic insert tray to remove and hold or place somewhere whilst you set up is just plain irritating.
It’s a decision that excludes two-thirds of the audience.
Those with the cash and desire for everything can fit some but not all the stuff into the box. An insert could have been designed to take it all and that would have avoided the annoyance of two open boxes and a plastic tray.
And for those who can’t or don’t want to splash out it’s a bit of a kick in the teeth. The empty spaces are a reminder every time you open the box just how lacking you are. As a new owner it’s anticlimactic, and even after a few months it still feels incomplete. For a game of this price it feels like you’ve been short-changed. You might argue that this is a review copy that I received free, so I can’t judge on the cost, but I bought my friend a copy with the hero decks during the Kickstarter campaign, well over a year before I was unexpectedly offered this review copy. I am very aware of the cost-to-value ratio, and to spend that much on a larger than necessary box that is mostly air doesn’t feel great. In the image below, I’ve got the empty cardboard sprues beneath the second tray simply to help take up space in the box.
Restoration Games have released a standard edition and the Maximum Chrome edition of Thunder Road: Vendetta. They’re more than capable of offering two versions of this, especially when the price of all in on TMNT is more than the big box of TR:V. A rare misstep.
Turtle power!
So there we have it. I still don’t have nostalgia-tinged feelings about this IP but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a genuine improvement over its predecessor, refining almost every aspect for a sharper and more engaging experience. It’s just a shame that it’s all packaged up in a way to mildly inconvenience the majority of players. Ah well, perfection is overrated!
Unmatched Adventures: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles details
- Designer: Brian Neff, Darren Reckner, Jason Hager, Jason Kemppainen, Justin D. Jacobson, Justin Kemppainen, Noah Cohen, Rob Daviau
- Artists: Brian Patterson, Heather Vaughan, Kevin Eastman, Kwanchai Moriya, Mihajlo Dimitrievski, Oliver Barrett, Yuta Onoda
- Publishers: Geekach LLC, IELLO, MeepleBR, Ogry Games, Reflexshop, Restoration Games
- Release Date: 2025
- Player count : 1 - 4
- Age range : 9+
- Time range : 20 - 40 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Action Points, Card Play Conflict Resolution, Cooperative Game, Hand Management, Line of Sight, Multi-Use Cards, Point to Point Movement, Solo / Solitaire Game, Variable Player Powers
- BGG Geek Rating: 8.38872 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
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