Unmatched is a modern classic. Unmatched, you might say, in the genre of miniature combat games. Accessible rules, punchy fights, card art that turns heads. It’s fun, especially for those of us who don’t generally enjoy player-versus-player miniature fighting games.
And then there’s Unmatched Adventures, a cooperative take on the system. The best of both worlds: all the fun of combat but working together to defeat a common enemy.
A lazy design studio might simply have created automated opponents and left it at that. Restoration Games is not a lazy design studio. Yes, the bulk of the game is indeed an automated boss and its minions fighting the players until one side is defeated. But the team pushed beyond that basic experience, adding little pressure points that influence how you approach defeating the big baddie.
A downside is that each villain is restricted to its own scenario, tied to a specific board and rules additions. You can’t mix-and-match villains in the same way as you can with the heroes. Mothman always tries to destroy the bridges of Point Pleasant, presumably to cause transportation chaos and highlight America’s overreliance on the automobile. Meanwhile, the Martian Invader is exclusively focussed on dropping aliens into the cornfields of McMinnville to confuse the locals. Each villain has its own ‘Evil Plan’ and the players lose if that plan is completed, even if all we’re actually talking about is bridges and corn fields (the initial plot or narrative is not Tales to Amaze’s strong point, but narratives emerge as you play in how the goodies and baddies interact).
The evil plans act as a timer. You can’t hang around because as more bridges are destroyed and more corn fields occupied, additional obstacles are thrown in the heroes’ way and the baddies become more powerful.
It keeps you on your toes. Yes, you want to unleash a big attack, but a lesser move will keep those bridges standing for longer. You could flee to safety, but perhaps staying within reach will help keep that field free from alien infestation. Each turn has you considering the positions of the villain and its minions, and the turning cogs of their evil plans.
There’s nothing complicated here; these are small tweaks more than anything, a step up from some of the existing competitive boards that have additions like secret passages, openable doors or collectible items. But they add just enough friction to get you hot under the collar.
It’s a sprinkling of tension and excitement that’s needed because the automation of the bad guys is utterly simple. They advance towards you and attack if they can. If they can’t attack, they tick the evil plan up another notch. Simples, as the meerkat says, just incredibly easy and flexible to run.
A good game of competitive Unmatched is a dance between the participants. Movement is key to the card management system and positioning matters. Unmatched should be fluid and flitting, but the villains and minions in Adventures aren’t even close to that. They don’t retreat, they don’t try to corner you, they simply advance dumbly and attack. It’s like the original Terminator trying out for Swan Lake.
The ‘Evil Plans’ add the grit that is missing. The baddies might only stomp robotically but there’s so much else to consider that their inability to think beyond ‘ATTACK’ doesn’t matter, and indeed can present you with strategic choices over who they might attack next.
It’s a solid system. Turn order is randomised each round, and the villains and minions each have their own quirks that keep things interesting. Just when you think you’re getting a handle on the Blob’s acid traps, the Loveland Frog starts slotting extra turns into the running order and suddenly it’s a priority to tackle the amphibian-hybrid first. The minions are great. You select a subset of them for each game and their personalities come through strong, each challenging you in a slightly different way. I’d buy a minion pack in a heartbeat.
In fact, the only real weakness about the game is its heroes. To be clear, individually they’re just as strong and diverse as you might hope from an Unmatched game. There’s nothing ground-breaking and they’re largely interesting variants on things we’ve seen before, but they’re good-to-great. The Restoration team has grown in confidence over the years, and the Tales to Amaze heroes are the result of that experience. Each has its own quirks, each asks players to adapt their approach, each gives you vaguely cool things to do. If you want a set of four solid fighters, then this is up there.
But they’re also a little forgettable. I’ve played Tales to Amaze a bunch and as I’ve thought about it and written this review, I’ve never once been able to hold the names of all four heroes in my head at the same time. There’s always one I forget and it’s not even the same hero. In contrast, I can name all the heroes in each of the fairly random Battle of Legends boxes without any effort.
There’s just no cohesion about the group, no sense that it even is a group. Unmatched’s pick-and-mix approach to heroes works in the competitive game, but under the umbrella of a cooperative ‘adventure’ the four heroes are narratively disjointed. You can’t imagine them actually teaming up; two of them don’t even fit the pulpy settings of Mothman and the Martian Invader.
This is mountains-out-of-molehills stuff, but such inconsistencies matter to the overall experience. Even the box itself is confused about them: just look at how uneven the front cover is in its portrayal of its heroes compared to every other Unmatched release featuring four heroes. It’s a beautiful front cover, no doubt about that, but it’s more like one of those badly photoshopped movie posters where the actors were never in the same room as each other.
The other minor issue, and this is perhaps something seen as part of the challenge more than a flaw, is to do with how often the game prevents you from doing something cool. Depending on the villain and minions you select, you can find yourself squaring off against enemies that repeatedly cancel your card effects or force you to discard cards. Given the small number of cards each baddie has, they come around with surprising regularity.
More than a quarter of the Tarantula’s cards and half the Jersey Devil’s cards are irritating like this. It’s like playing against someone whose deck has 10 Feint cards and anytime you try to do something interesting they just block you. This is part of the difficulty of the game, but because you see them so frequently they can lead to sequences of turns where nothing you do has any effect. It obviously depends on the baddies chosen and the shuffle, but at its worst this can make the game feel frustrating and unfair, limiting the thrills.
Despite these very minor blemishes, Tales to Amaze is excellent, a wonderful twist on an already compelling system. It provides moments of drama and excitement, genuinely challenging fights and is as well produced as anything in Unmatched. The card art is spectacular, the miniatures are lovely and it’s nice to be playing on a larger Unmatched board. Mechanically it sings, tweaks like the turn order flips and the personalities of the minions keeping players invested throughout. If the villains’ objectives feel a little low stakes and the team of heroes thematically underwhelming, it’s because of the high bar set by everything else in the game.
