One of the major selling points of Restoration Games’
Unmatched series is that each box (with the exception of two out-of-print releases) is a self-contained game with everything you need to play. You get between two and four characters with their accompanying miniatures, cards and counters, along with a board which is often double-sided, offering two possible battlefields for the game, and a complete rule book including any special rules for the included characters.
With
Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze, they’ve gone one better – in addition to four new fighters, the box includes a whole new game mode, introducing cooperative play into what until now has been strictly a skirmish game. Now, instead of fighting among themselves, players have the option to team up against either the mysterious Mothman or a Martian invasion.
Unmatched Adventures game setup. Image © Restoration Games.
Pulp Fiction
The four included heroes have a decidedly pulp flavor to them.
Dr. Jill Trent is an obscure public domain comic book character who, along with her sidekick Daisy, investigated science-related mysteries in the pages of Wonder Comics between 1946 and 1948.
The Golden Bat is a character from Japanese popular culture who is often credited as being the world’s first superhero, having predated Superman by eight years.
Annie Christmas is a figure from Louisiana folklore, a larger than life keelboat captain whose pearl necklace represents all the men she’s defeated. Finally we have
Nikola Tesla, the real-life electrical engineer and visionary whose combat readiness may have been a tiny bit exaggerated for the purposes of this game.
The Golden Bat, Nikola Tesla, Jill Trent, and Annie Christmas, ready for action. Image © Restoration Games.
These four are fully playable
Unmatched fighters, and can no doubt hold their own against Bruce Lee, King Arthur, or any of the other characters that have made their way into the game thus far. But they’re really here to team up against one or another of
Tales to Amaze’s two villains.
The first is the
Mothman, an urban legend first reported in West Virginia in 1966. In reality, the sightings of a large bird-like creature were probably of cranes who had gotten lost during their migration season, but that didn’t prevent the popular press of the time from blowing the whole thing out of proportion and creating a menacing creature with glowing red eyes, even if it’s unclear what the monster’s purpose was.
The second villain is the
Martian Invader, based on the archetypal flying saucer myths that started with H.G. Wells’
War of the Worlds, became a staple in 1950s science fiction films, and persist even today.
The Mothman and the Martian Invader. Image © Restoration Games.
Let’s All Team Up and Fight ‘Em!
Unmatched Adventures is fully cooperative, with the villains controlled by a simple but effective set of “target the closest hero” rules and a deck of cards that determines the exact nature of the attack, in terms consistent with regular
Unmatched play.
In addition to attacking the players, the villain has an objective that will end the game if completed. In the Mothman’s case, he wants to destroy four bridges in the town where the battle takes place, a well thought out call-out to the original Mothman reports from the 1960s. When he is too far away to attack a player character, he advances a threat tracker at the top of the board – once he makes it to the last space on the tracker, a bridge is destroyed, causing a one-time detrimental effect for the players, and the tracker resets. Various game effects will add doom markers to the bridges still on the board, which will make the threat tracker move faster and get the Mothman to his goal faster.
The Martian Invader has a similar tracker, signifying their progress in taking over the wheat fields of McMinnville, Oregon. In their case, each time the tracker fills up they flip over a token that activates additional game text on their attack cards. It’s a fun game mechanism that creates a variable timer for the players to try to mitigate, in addition to beating the hell out of the villain.
Every Villain Needs Minions
As a way to scale the game’s difficulty for the number of players, the villains get an equal number of minions, smaller characters with their own decks of cards that work similarly to player character sidekicks. In keeping with the theme, the minions are a fun mix of urban legends and b-movie staples like the Skunk Ape of Florida, the Blob, and giant ants and tarantulas. Each minion uses the same targeting mechanism as the main villain, but has their own unique play style that players will need to adapt to.
Tales to Amaze features six different minions. Photo by Jefferson Powers.
This Feels Familiar
Objectives and minions aside, this is still
Unmatched – interacting with the game-controlled fighters isn’t that different from playing against a human opponent, and a lot of the same strategy and tactics will apply here. It is, at heart, a fighting game, and you will defeat the villain and its minions by fighting them.
The game even includes a few simple rules to help accommodate any of the other
Unmatched characters as well, although there are a few that require their opponents to make nuanced decisions, such as Sherlock Holmes or Blackbeard, or have the potential to break the game (Black Panther could remove the card that reshuffles the villain or minion’s deck, making them unable to attack or defend, for example), that might not work so well. Personally I can’t wait to see how
Jurassic Park’s T-Rex does against the Mothman...
Advice for New Players
Even if you are familiar with
Unmatched, there are a few things you will want to consider when playing
Unmatched Adventures. First and foremost,
be patient. Each villain/minion combination has its own optimal approach, so give yourself time to figure out what that approach is. Different combinations of the characters included in
Adventures will work differently, and you will want to try them all to see what works best. Also, I would suggest starting with the included characters for a bit before you branch out to other
Unmatched fighters, since presumably the four in the box won’t have anything that breaks the game, and some of the others might be a little unpredictable – for example, we found that Blackbeard and Robin Hood made short work of the Mothman, where we had earlier been struggling to beat him with Annie Christmas and Golden Bat.
Blackbeard and Robin Hood take on the Mothman. Photo by Jefferson Powers.
Also, don't use the
Jersey Devil minion for your first few plays. He uses a card milling strategy that honestly isn't much fun to play against, so save him for when you really feel like you want a greater challenge (or just skip him all together).
When there’s a problem with cooperative games, it’s usually that the game is either too easy or too difficult – only the very best hit that sweet spot that let’s you win but makes you work for it. If
Unmatched Adventures starts to feel too easy, the game includes a set of Amazing Event cards that introduce minor game effects or modifications designed to make winning more difficult for the players.
And if you’re finding it to be too difficult? Bring in Robin Hood and Blackbeard, that worked for us...
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