How to Play

The goal of the game is to kill your opponent’s fighter, the moment they hit 0 health, you win. To do that, you’ll manage a hand of cards, moving your hero around the map, and attacking their hero.

You start with 5 cards, and you have 2 actions, to do any combination of these 3 actions, and you can do the same action twice.

Action 1: Draw a card, then move up to your move value on the board, can’t move through enemies. BUT you see this guy that is also your color here? This is called your sidekick, which also gets to move your move value.

Action 2: Play a lightning bolt card: just play a lightning bolt that matches one of your characters on the map.

Action 3: ATTACK, you attack something adjacent to you, but if you’re ranged, they can be in the same color zone as you… and you can also attack with your sidekick, just remember to play the right attack card. To attack, just drop an attack card from your hand, red, or purple, that’s your attacking value. The target player can play a defend card, blue or purple. Flip the cards, resolve any abilities. Defender takes damage that is the difference between the cards.

After your 2 actions, you just pass your turn, next person goes, and does 2 actions. That’s the game! We’ll get a little bit more into the 2v2 game mode later.

Pros

Presentation wise, Unmatched has top marks. There’s pre-washed miniatures for Medusa’s hair, or Sinbad’s muscles. Then sidekicks are hard, thick plastic with printed pictures on them that feel great to move around the board. These all fit nicely into the insert which packages away everything with even words for where to put your sidekicks, and grooves to stack dials on top of one another.

The insert REALLY makes this game LIGHTNING fast to set up. All you do is grab your hero mini, deck, sidekicks, smack them on a starting location on the board, and you’re ready to start playing. This can take like, 30 seconds!

Cards are good quality, with a TON of varied art between the heroes, including unique backs Each hero has their unique flair and color scheme and when their cards abilities aren’t unique, the art is: look at all the different poses to the side. Then having all of the card info on the top left corners is awesome, because when you’re holding cards in hand, you can see what everything does at a quick glance. There’s even nice card count on the bottom right corners of cards to help strategy.

There’s just home run and after home run here, with fantastic symbols, player aid, and even rulebook, that has a combat example diagram that puts most other rulebooks to shame.

Unmatched clearly gets itself playing pronto with no hiccups, so onto gameplay pros, starting with the asymmetry, of the 4 fighters, with their 4 unique decks/sidekicks/character abilities:

Alice is a flexible fighter who can go BIG and increase all of her attacks damage… or shrink to get more natural defense! Gotta know when to change size with her with her specific cards, and if you’re small and want to attack, well send out your Jabberwocky to attack.

Sinbad plays more for late game, where he’s all about playing voyages which have mediocre stats, but have an ability where they get boosted by voyages in your discard! Then it makes these ‘alright’ attacks become 5 damage, then one can do TWO more damage after the fight! Or another can look at your opponent’s hand! Plus the more voyages there are in your discard, the faster you move off of his passive.

King Arthur just swings big with EXCALIBUR!! 6 damage to anything no complication needed! Also, his ability is that for any attack, he can ‘boost’ it, adding another card’s boost value to increase the value. This can make Excalibur do freaking 9 damage! Merlin is his ranged counterpart to cast RIDICULOUS spells, like moving everything on the board 3 spaces!

Medusa is a ranged archer, and she has a sneaky ping for 1 damage at the start of every turn. She needs to manage THREE harpies to do her bidding. But they only have 1 health… but she has a way to bring them back and have them move through enemies! Shrink your opponent’s hand when they attack you, then launch a giant second shot that gets boosted… 7 damage attack! Or if they’re really defenseless, you can Gaze of Stone for a potential TEN damage if not properly blocked!

This may sound like a bit of a mouthful with all of these special abilities and asymmetric powers, but really, its quite easy to grasp with each character because almost a 1/3 of their deck is generic cards. This makes the card counterplay really intuitive to grasp after the 2nd time you see “Feint”- oh its a card that can cancel my attacking ability, and blocks for 2.

But wait, Feint can attack OR defend! So this gets us to how Unmatched is mind games galore with the combat. Attacking interactions trigger SOO many of your character abilities, and getting them off by winning a combat, meaning you do damage as an attacker, or not getting damaged as a defender are like giving you another action.

Let’s start simple, how about attacking with “Regroup”- sure this only does 1 damage… but maybe your opponent wants to block it, because if it succeeds, you’ll draw 2 cards? Or let’s look at “Momentous Shift”, it gets to be 5 power if you moved this turn… so every time I move and go to attack you, does that mean I’m using Momentous Shift for 5 damage? Or am I just playing a “Regroup” to weed out your strong defense cards, since that pays for itself after played?

Add in the character specific cards, and things get spicy: How about Sinbad leaping himself away 4 spaces, or moving the other hero 4 spaces… but this only happens if Sinbad wins the combat… so if you think your opponent has this in his hand, does it look like he wants to move right now?

And no one said you had to use Feint as a defend either, here we can use it as an attack to NEGATE king’s Arthur’s ONLY way to heal himself, that’s basically the game right there.

My favorite is Medusa’s Gaze of Stone we talked about… because it CAN be really good if not or barely blocked, but has such a low value its easy to entirely block and give the defender winning combat bonuses on their defense cards. High risk high reward card, which rightfully keeps you on your feet against Medusa.

You have to ask, are people attacking just to do damage? To potentially reposition? To draw cards? To setup Sinbad’s Voyage card discard? The fact that purple cards can attack or defend makes it VERY tempting to not defend with something, to later attack with it to take advantage of the high number.

Pros Cont.

Now we have to praise the game’s inclusion of sidekicks for every character in Unmatched, which adds another layer of thinking of their cards and positioning, without adding mechanics, since sidekicks operate the same way as heroes. Sidekicks are basically mini heroes.

How do you use those sidekicks, since they move just as fast as your hero? Do you send them off to go attack? Do you use them to block off chokepoints? Do you use the harpies as a shield for medusa? When fighting against sidekicks, should you just kill them asap to limit your opponent’s board presence and render all of their sidekick cards almost useless? Or maybe you just focus attacks on your opponent’s hero and ignore their sidekick, since killing a sidekick won’t exactly win you the game. It’s a pretty potent question you’ll have to answer with every matchup and opponent playing tendencies.

Attached to drawing a card is a free move, so you might as well move like crazy if you can. And you have flexibility to ‘boost’ that move by discarding a card for its ‘boost’ value. Or how there’s a TON of attacking cards that move you after attacking. You can attack, then move off of that attack, then go attack something else, which can be really good for killing a sidekick then dashing straight for their hero.

Speaking about moving around enemies, let’s talk about when the board gets a little more crowded with the 2v2. This mode actually adds a little more nuance to the game, where since there’s more bodies on the board, and you can’t normally walk through enemies, the chokepoints are pretty cool to play around with sidekicks blocking off bridges. As such, you’re gonna want to constantly talk with your teammate who you’re planning to kill, or what spaces you’re gonna occupy so they can move around you. Maybe you have King Arthur attack one player like crazy, to weaken their hand, then Medusa goes in for the stone gaze kill 10 damage!

Let’s talk replayability now though, where there’s 2 maps, one with a simple bridge, the other with on a more interconnected castle that plays more connected zones (important for Medusa). Add that to 4 heroes, where you can play 1v2, and 2v2, and there’s good options, but not necessarily with 1v1, we’ll get back to that later.

For more replayability, you have likely seen TONS of Unmatched boxes at retail stores, and yep, they’re all quite similar to this box where they give you some maps and anywhere between 2-4 heroes. And I looked at the rulebooks for these other games, and they’re pretty much the exact same thing. This means if you want more replayability, all you have to do is grab a couple of boxes, and mix and match all of the heroes and maps, no need to read new rules! Usually we don’t talk about expansions in pros, but Unmatched is designed from the ground up to seamlessly toss in new stuff, and must be praised as such.

The last pro is that Unmatched really does run true to time of 20-40 minutes. 1v1 is more around 20-40 minutes, and 2v2 is more like 30-60 minutes. Games are guaranteed to end as you take damage when decking out, and the 2v2 can run a little longer if you’re a talkative group, but for the most part, the speedy tactical-ness of Unmatched checks out.

Cons

The rulebook, despite it being mostly good, glosses over the ‘boosting’ for attacks too much. This is where you play an additional facedown card to adds strength to a played attack. There should have been at least an example. Granted, this is a simple mechanic, but it would have been nice to see an example for it for a game that prides itself on such good accessibility.

Now let’s get into gameplay cons, and this is where we reveal that Unmatched… is actually unbalanced. Let’s start with the mighty King Arthur, who is actually really underpowered.

So his main ability is that he can play 2 cards as an attack, to have one of those cards boost the other. BUT this boost can just get utterly negated by a Feint to negate Boost, BY negating the card, so you don’t get that effect either, so a double whammy in defending against Arthur. Sure, some damage might go through, but card advantage is SO important in Unmatched, that by losing 2 cards to just do your base card effect with no ability is not a good play.

Excalibur is King Arthur’s strongest attack, for 6 damage, and yes as we said before you can’t feint it, which is cool, but you only have 1 excalibur card in a deck of 30, 2 if you count lady of the lake to take an action to grab excalibur from your discard, but then you lose a bit of a surprise factor. King Arthur’s best attack, by spending 2 cards, is 9 damage, which can get feinted, so often 7 damage for 2 cards. In comparison:

Alice can do Jabberwocky attack for 5-6 damage with 1 card, and she has multiple of those cards. PLUS she has an ability to passively defend herself or turn a skirmish into 6 damage with her passive… oh Excalibur also did 6 by itself huh.

You simply cannot boost too many attacks with Arthur, because even if you have the right boosts to use, you’ll quickly run out of cards, and Arthur struggles getting his hand back up. He only has 3 ways to +1 card advantage off of his unique cards (Aid of Morgana, Prophecy, Aid the Chosen One), whereas other heroes have built in +2, or ways to discard their opponent’s hand.

But wait, King Arthur has merlin right, that’s how he makes up for deficiencies! Kind of. Yes, Merlin is kind of like the hero for King Arthur, where his lightning drops are great, like doing some area of effect attack that can let you draw a card. Or move everything on the board. Or how Merlin having range for normal attacks gives him more flexibility. But Merlin is STILL not good enough to make King Arthur balanced, because there’s just not THAT many Merlin cards compared to King Arthur ones, making him unreliable as a source of damage. So you still have to use plenty of King Arthur attacking cards still that demand boost be used, which is just a card inefficient play. Oh, and King Arthur being card inefficient means that he can possibly deck out because he just requires so many cards to do his boost ability.

Uhh ok, but what about health, King Arthur has the most health at 18, AND a massive way to heal with this holy grail card! True, but the problem with this is that health really doesn’t matter much until you hit 0, card advantage is still crucial to attack and defend.

On the other end of the spectrum is Medusa, who isn’t nearly as strong as King Arthur is weak, but overtuned in multiple ways. First, she’s ranged, which it in of itself is an insanely strong trait especially on the castle map. Hitting about half of the map is just ridiculous, especially in 2v2, giving Medusa clean access to the ‘attack’, then ‘attack’ super efficient turns many ameritrash games suffer with, where whoever has to move on the map doesn’t have access to both attacks.

Her harpies are just really good too, which only have 1 health, but have a base move of 3, and with this winged frenzy card, can move THROUGH opponents and literally resurrect one dead harpy. The harpy potential to block off parts of the map or soak up attacks are too good… remember attacking them ONLY does 1 damage ever, because they only have 1 health, and there’s no area of effect attacks to punish 1 health. While you’re dealing with them, Medusa sits in place and keeps pinging for 1 damage with her passive ability which is quite good against low health sidekicks. And she has a way to BOOST one of her already strong attacks, and she has the strongest boost values in the game!

Granted, Unmatched is a game filled with some randomness in drawing cards and then there’s some matchup quirks, so I went online to see if anyone had any thoughts. And YEP, these balance issues were all over the BGG page, and if I take its spreadsheet of 12,000 total entries, and just use the King Arthur data against this box’s characters, he has a 31.66% win rate which is really embarrassing. Medusa has a good win rate overall of 57% overall.

Now this isn’t logged tournament play, so I can’t know for certain what percentage of these recorded games are from newcomers, since King Arthur is definitely harder to play, and Medusa easier, but I have heard many anecdotes of people who have played dozens of games who clearly think King Arthur sucks, and so I’m gonna contribute to the online fixes for him. I would actually give him ANOTHER excalibur to provide another strong attack, or some strong attack to do 5 damage, and give it some other ability like a free move of Merlin or something. And then just give him more cards in his deck so he’s not so prone to decking out. For Medusa, we would start by making the harpy speed from 3 to 2, and lowering her boost values.

You may have noticed that Sinbad and Alice also don’t quite have 50% win rates, win rate getting pushed down by Medusa of course, but they are a lot more normal feeling compared to freaking King Arthur and Medusa. And luckily, the imbalance isn’t nearly as bad if you play 2v2, since characters do end up covering up for each other’s weaknesses, and positioning for team play matters more to not make it all about the card play.

But, if you’re playing 1v1, the imbalance does definitely drag down the standalone replayability there, especially if your group has similar skill levels in games. Sure, the decks will give out different cards, with plenty of room for misplaying or mind gaming well, so matchups are never solved, but you have been warned, and there’s some ways to increase the replayability by buying more sets which we’ll talk about in Final Thoughts.

Nitpicks

These are not ultimately affecting scoring, so you can scroll ahead to that if you want.

First there’s the miniatures, where yes, they are washed, but definitely not in a clean way. If you take a close look, you can see there’s zero on these people’s faces! Or how the bottom of the bases has just wash splattered all over it which looks messy.

For gameplay nitpicks, let’s start with Feint: the card that every hero has 3 of. Feint is an automatic “NO” to your opponent’s attack ability, while blocking for 2, which makes it a really good card to defend with. Sure, you’ll likely take some damage, but entirely negating your opponent’s attack ability, where characters rely on a lot of those abilities to move, do more damage, draw cards, etc. is not only a good play, but makes the game feel dry. Suddenly, instead of doing cool things, you’re just comparing a number, which REALLY helps you if you defend with feint when you’re poised to win the game. Like, who cares if you take a bunch of damage as long as you’re still alive, your opponent didn’t get to do any extra ability, then you keep pressing your lead. Sometimes, duh, defend feint.

Everyone has 3 feint, so its not an issue with balance, and you can just bait out your opponent’s feints, and use it in a cool way to attack its just that its ability while blocking is TOO all-encompassing for its number. Perhaps giving it a defense of 1, and an attack of 2 would be fine, but I’m sure they didn’t want to do that to be confusing.

Then as much as we praised positioning, it can lose a lot of nuance once sidekicks all die on the map, making the game just a “me run, you run” situation where players draw cards, then move to run away from their opponent. In the case of melee fighting, maybe both players just draw cards then play cards, and don’t move on some turns. This is why we have to go back to the 2v2, where more sidekicks and more heroes just means that there’s more going on for positioning to matter more. The fact that static boards ARE possible isn’t that bad, since the game is already simple, and making positioning simpler keeps the game short.

Then let’s talk about Sinbad, where while his power level seems pretty well tuned, he’s kind of a one-dimensional character… in that all he needs to do is personally melee attack. So the only way Sinbad can win is through putting voyages in his discard, they must be there. So it’s fairly easy to strategize around him, as he’s weak unless he’s attacking a lot, or makes his hand really big to force himself to discard voyages. Him being so simple can damper replayability a bit, but hey, not a big deal for the scope of this game.

The last nitpick is how this game handles card randomness, where you can have completely dead hands at times, if your sidekick dies early. Sure, while you can discard these sidekick cards to boost movement, you can’t do anything else with them, which can make some hands just devolve into oh, ‘I must draw and run away’.

It’s hard to bluff when you don’t have a good hand, because if you’re in a position to attack with a bunch of cards and don’t attack, your opponent will know something’s up. A great example of randomness punishing you is being King Arthur, and literally never drawing excalibur or lady in the lake to get it. It can happen!

You open with just 5 cards in your opening hand, but we would have wanted to see at least an advanced variant to allow you to mulligan to have less of a chance of drawing poop. But aaah, this isn’t a big deal of a game of this scope.