Unmatched Review - Featherweight Fantasy Fightin'

have you ever wondered who would win if Medusa for Robin Hood or wanted to pitch Bruce Lee against the Raptors from Jurassic Park I know you haven't but give it about 16 minutes and 5 seconds unmatched is a new release from restoration games a company of gaming necromancer's who breathe life into old games dispatching them back into the modern marketplace like fashionable Frankenstein's unmatched is actually a resurrection of 2002 game Star Wars epic deals except instead of Star Wars it's now just stars allowing you to arrange fights between some of the greatest warriors of time and space in theory in practice at the time of this review it's mostly warriors who restoration games were able to rummage out of the bargain basement of out of copyright literature you know him you love him it's Sinbad the sailor fortunately unmatched is also a collaboration between a restoration games and mondo a company you might best know for producing movie posters that are classier than anything you Norden narrowly find on this channel and mando's art direction has made this the most bewitching ly sexy board game I have ever seen as well as adding characters from intellectual properties that mondo presumably hadn't in with like this Jurassic Park box and all of the fighters in these different sets can be pitched against ton another and more sets are coming in 2020 we can look forward to a buffy the vampire box as well as a box called cobble and smog adding characters from Victorian literature to look through any one of these sets is to be instantly sold on unmatched berserk silliness in fact with Mondo's help we can update the official shut up and sit down list of cool board games it's been a while since I updated this so you want to play unmatched you've selected your board you've chosen your champions you've spun up your dials and you've drawn a starting hand five cards from your own personal deck all you have to do then is learn how to play the game and it is shockingly simple this one goes out to all the og shut up and sit down fans out there but I think I could teach this game in a single breath so we're not mad you have to damage your opponent down to zero health on your turn you get two actions and each one can be either maneuver scheme or attack if you maneuver you draw one card and can move all of your characters up to their movement value if you scheme you play a card with a lightning ball and do what it says with that character printed on the card if you attack you have to pick a target now melee characters can only attack things that are adjacent to them ranged characters can do that or attack anyone else in their colored zone when you plan attack card the defender then has a choice of playing a defense card cards with this symbol can attack or defend and something else if you ever have to draw a card but your deck has run out you instead take one damage [Music] so what could be simpler than that well why don't we start with actually winning the game a very early consideration in unmapped is when you should spend your turn drawing cards nudging you back towards that flat powerful fan that represents the games hand limit because the more cards you have the better you're going to be able to cherry pick the exact right attack or defense or scheme for whatever happens in the game but stop because if you've backed your opponent into a corner or if they happen to not be holding defense cards or if they're trying to just pull off something a bit unusual in choosing to draw a card rather than apply pressure you might be giving your opponent breathing room do you want to let your opponent breathe I didn't think so also and I adore this don't forget that the action of drawing a card then gives you and your allies a free move so embedded even in that simple decision of when to draw a card are yet more foxy questions are you going to be able to make the most of that windfall the free movement points you're about to get does it matter if you draw a card and then don't use the moves is that you playing efficiently what happens if your opponent then runs away and you're at your hand limit and you need to move again your first matches of undaunted will also see you fretting as to when to attack and with what card whether to try and KO their fighter winning you the game or whether to first carve up those bothersome two-dimensional groupies / Medusa is gonna be a lot less tough without her harpies but is it really worth hunting them all down first and what if they start running away and these are just your first few matches as you gain familiarity with all of undaunted as different decks you'll find yourself playing around specific cards Medusa still hasn't played our stone gaze and so you're left trying to avoid it like you're waiting for a bus I'm not bus that's gonna pick you up I mean a bus that's gonna run you over each 15 minute match of undaunted plays like a dance with players constantly jostling for not where they should be which would be dull but where they think they should be based on this deliciously woolly knowledge of your hand what you think your opponent's hand is what you know about your deck and your opponent's deck because of course since all of these characters are different they all have different dancing styles so in one match you might get a motion King Arthur pursuing the slow ballroom orbit of an evasive Robin Hood while shouldering is merry-men out of the way in another game a shot gun toting game warden is gonna be trying to prevent being cornered in the club by the advances of three very clever girls I'm probably now at the risk of making unmatched sound clever and it is you know packing this much play into such freakishly simple rules is a feat of design genius but this is not a game to buy if you want to match wits with someone there's just too much guesswork for that listen every time anyone plays a card you have to make the choice of whether to defend and with what and this is a crapshoot you could play your trump defense against junk you could not defend against an attack that's gonna send your health dial into freefall and the one card that every character has is a feint that can attack or defend and blanks your opponent's card when should you play it I have absolutely no idea ask the cab driver who recently talked to me for 10 minutes straight about his winning strategy for roulette but unlike that cab driver are still like unmatched listen I recently wholeheartedly recommended combo fighter and that game is 70% rock-paper-scissors taking a chance is fun it's the foundation of everything from poker to tinder to democracy and in games it means that skilled players can do canal with idiots or kids or idiot kids and one almost is full of guesswork it's a happy kind of guesswork when you play a card ah and you guess wrong intangibly it just feels like your fault and besides players in this game won't have time to be annoyed because the action in this match just crackles along look here I just set up Robin Hood vs. big fir and I know what you're thinking at last I can see who wins between these two champion that never mind the point is that unmatched has this explosive staccato structure where ever action anyone can take is quick and simple yet aggressive and affecting turn one I - up to you as Robin Hood's her and take a shot twang and you defend with a card BAM the card text lets me move again huh their new maneuver zap and you move next to me whoosh then I run away zip an attack or to paraphrase that sequence huh train bam hood zap zip BAM and all of that might have happened in the first two minutes of the game unmatched it's like popcorn it is light but it's crunchy it is sweet but it's salty and like popcorn all of my friends liked it although not all of them want to spend money because if I have a problem it's that it is a little in substantial a match of unmatched we'll always start with both players nervous and excited and will frequently be that way right up to the end but just as often as if there's a leak in this experience the tension and the excitement can about by the final 5 minutes if you get lucky with a couple of exchanges killing a raptor or a couple of minions or just whipping someone's health right down it can become pretty clear that that player is very unlikely to be able to pull things back and so games have unmatched often end with one player you know gamely playing on even though they know they've lost and the other player dutifully beating them to death and modern board games are a master class of ordinarily avoiding this sensation now let me be crystal clear a lot of games have unmatched our fun from start to finish but lots are fun from start to not quite finished and that is a medium-sized deal because when it comes to getting your money's worth from a board game it is all about how much more likely you are to take it down off the shelf after you've played it a couple of times and I would find my hand lingering over unmatched because I couldn't fully rely on it to blow everybody away but two things first off yes this game was on my shelf in the first place it has made it into my collection of my hundred and fifty favorite games and yes I have a hundred and fifty board games do check out this video on my collection if you're interested or horrified and - there was an occasion in which I would gleefully yank this game off my shelf with my fingers trembling with anticipation which was whenever I bought a new set so up to this point I've been reviewing unmatched as a really pretty fun self-contained game but if you and your friends dig it it is a delight to collect restoration games has done a superb job of giving every character a unique play style from Alice shrinking and growing to Robin Hood getting a gang of nobodies to Juke around with them and block the enemy and I'm thrilled the restoration games only seem to be getting more ambitious this new Jurassic Park pack gives the park security a bunch of these trap tokens to play around with and the Raptors are actually three fighters and you have to kill all of them to win but they do more damage the longer the Raptor player can keep all three of them alive so just losing one of them ah yeah hurts that was your baby your toothy predatory baby so where does that leave us well if you're looking for and involved and complicated to play a fighting game I would say unmatched probably isn't it personally I would look for a game where I'm gonna have a richer experience I'm gonna get more out of replete place but if you're looking for a fluffy bit of fun to spend your money on they're not even a bit of fun a fluffy lot of fun I would say you should absolutely try unmatched because don't forget it's cheap for just $20 you can try either of the two players starter sets although I would say that the Jurassic Park one is better has a better theme it's got more interesting characters or for $30 you could get the Battle of Legends vol 1 which has four characters in it letting you play not just a two-player game but the three player game one versus one versus one which isn't very good maybe maybe don't play that or the two versus two team game which is interesting because ithat's this extra tactical layer where both teams are going to want to focus down one of their opponents so the game becomes two versus one but then when you know that there's a lot more retreating and movement and it becomes absolutely fascinating honestly there is not dud among the sets that they have released so far even this little Bruce Lee box which are just $10 for one character but no map is the worst value proposition but then I looked inside Bruce Lee's deck actually has more unique cards some more variety within the deck than any other character released so far and Lakia he's got a glittery base I hope you tribute for anyone who got annoyed at him being the butt of Quentin Tarantino's jokes in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Quentin if you're watching this can I speak to you just as one Quentin to another what are you doing the man is a legend I'll just leave you with one final thought if you're still on the fence about unmatched I would consider trying just one of the two player sets just to support the art in the last 10 years I've been lucky enough to watch board games grow into a dazzling new era of illustration from the Magnificent interfaces of amo tulle to the captivating coziness of Beth Sobel to quench AI Maria's frantic playfulness we are so blessed that today's games can feel like powerful expressions of the artist as much as the designer and yet even within this stylistic explosion unmatched still feels perhaps unmatched I thought I was bored of Alice in Wonderland but look at how it's been imagined here with this hallucinatory aggression and sickening pink I still couldn't care less about Robin Hood or Bigfoot but that was before I looked at their decks and saw how they highlighted Robin Hood's bow and arrow in this pale shade that makes him seem darker and his tants divine and dangerous and look how much fun they've had with Bigfoot being a conspiracy I will literally be acquiring future unmatched sets just to own the art but of course art is subjective who among us can truly say what is good art fortunately for board game reviewers like me as we all know games are not subjective so we will be ending this review as we do all of our reviews with the shut up and sit down data dump well it's just tabulating now oh here we go of course as always we'll start with game playing it'll be no surprise when I say that unmatched maths out with the solid four stars moving on to replay er gameplay it's big with the kids these days there is some drop-off of smiles per second so that comes in of just one thumb up moving on to politics it's hard not to see unmatched as profiteering from conflict but it does have some women in it so that clocks in 51% errata sysm some big points up for grabs here between Medusa and Bruce Lee we found we were continually a bit sweaty nice price adjusted for taxation inflation and resale attitude is a whopping $7 sound no cleanliness absolutely first-rate no dirt in that box at all cleanliness of sound 10 / 10 cleanliness of eroticism yes and finally fun let's take a look at the chart Wow I think that just about says it all so in summary shut up and sit down recommends unmatched it is beautiful it's easy to learn it's simple it's smart it's cheap and it is a fantastic bit of fun if you've enjoyed the scientific rigour on display in this review hey we've got other videos speaking of beautiful things be sure to check out Matt's review of nemesis last week and also if you missed it do definitely check out my review of the King's dilemma my contender to the throne of my 2020 game of the year thanks for tuning everybody

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 203,090

Rating: 4.9593334 out of 5

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Unmatched, Fighting Games, Jurassic Park

Id: H00TOCodVgI

Length: 16min 7sec (967 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Ten19]

"Undaunted" instead of "Unmatched" count: 3

[u/ncolaros]

This game looks right up my alley, and up none of the alleys of my friends.

[u/Working_Rough]

"Buffy The Vampire" would be a very different thing that I am up for.

[u/MrGlantz]

This game is great fun! I bought the robin hood vs Bigfoot one almost as soon as it came out and Its a blast to take out and play once in a while.

Im probably not buying more until Cobble and Fog which is the next set that I'm interested in.

[u/Stevetr0n]

I've been flip-flopping back and forth on this one for a while, but seeing that beautiful card art has me leaning towards this as my next purchase. I see that BGG lists the average game time as 20-40 mins. Can anyone who has put in a few games confirm this? I may pick up a copy tomorrow while at the shop if that's the case.

[u/bleuchz]

Interesting Quinns mentions 3p 1v1v1.

The rules still haven't been released for three players to my knowledge.

[u/iveo83]

wait so you don't need the "starter" set? You can just pick up any of them? Or combine any of them?

[u/mbrochh]

Looks like a pretty awesome filler game for my group.

[u/Flipflop_Ninjasaur]

Put Medusa in anything and you've already sold me.