Unmatched Battle Of Legends, Vol. 1

Unmatched Battle Of Legends is a game system where you can mix and match all the sets to have crazy mash-ups. You can pitch the Raptors from the Jurassic Park set against Sinbad from The Battle of Legends Vol 1. set, or Bigfoot from Robin Hood and Bigfoot set against Angel from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer set.

The good thing though, is that although they all play differently, the basics of every character are the same. You pilot your individual deck to try and reduce the health of your opponent’s hero down to zero. Unlike most games I have played, there are no points in Unmatched Battle Of Legends. You simply are duelling to the death. The winner is the last person standing after defeating all the opponents’ heroes. Each character has an asymmetric starting health which is, in my opinion, what adds balance to these characters. This balancing is needed as the characters have individual card powers and special abilities.

How Does It Work?

In the Unmatched system of games, you have a “hero” which has a unique starting health; you may also have sidekicks. Your hero is a detailed sun drop miniature on a coloured base. Your sidekicks are represented by screen-printed plastic tokens. Each character has their own deck which contains cards with unique actions on them, these are heavily thematic. For example, Dr Jekyll will have cards that turn him into Mr Hyde. And Dr Watson (Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick) has a card that is his trusty service revolver. Each deck has a different makeup of cards, some of these cards will be specific to your hero. Some can only be used by your sidekicks and many are “any” cards that can be used by any of your pieces.

These cards come in four varieties, attack, defence, versatile (attack or defence) and scheme cards. The aim of the game is to reduce your opponent’s health to zero. This is achieved by landing successful hits using scheme or attacking type cards.

The decks are identifiable by the unique artwork on the card backs. I am a self-confessed artwork snob when it comes to board games, and Unmatched Battle Of Legends has some seriously good art. The graphic design is sleek, using clear colours and iconography for the card usage but the card artwork sings. The cards are all thematically named, and with stunning artwork. Try not to get distracted from taking your turn by being drawn into the card art!

This game is a quick skirmish game that uses maps made up of a series of coloured circles. This layout makes working out attack zones straightforward. I have heard line-of-sight rules to be held in similar regard to the football offside rule. Characters are either “melee” which means they must be adjacent to their target in order to attack, or “ranged” which means they may attack any piece in the same colour as theirs. Initially, I was sceptical that a melee character would be underpowered compared to a ranged character, but I can honestly say that this advantage is balanced by the cards and the special abilities of the characters.

Let’s Get Ready To Battle

Unmatched Battle Of Legends at two-player is around twenty minutes long. Set-up wise, the hardest part is picking a character. Contrary to what the name suggests, the characters are all pretty well matched. There are some characters which you may find easier to play than others, and some will be more suited to your game style than others. For me, I love Bigfoot and his sidekick the Jackalope, they sneak through the trees and bash the enemy hard. I enjoy playing as Medusa and Robert Muldoon because they each have a lot of sidekick tokens that can be used as a meat shield to fend off attacks from melee fighters. For your first time, I would suggest picking the character you most like the look of, for me, my first was Robert Muldoon and I still love playing as that one.

Once you have picked your character, you select the map. These are generally very similar and I find them to add variety rather to totally change gameplay. Open the map board and place it in the centre of the table. Set up really is dead easy for these games. Collect your chosen character’s miniature, their sidekick round tokens if they have them, your health tracker(s), and your personal deck of cards. Set your special ability player aid card down next to your shuffled deck, then choose who takes the first turn. Whoever goes first should place their hero in the number one and their sidekicks into the same zone as their hero.

Once all characters are on the board, you each draw your starting hand of five cards, and you are ready to battle.

How To Bash Your Foe Into Oblivion

Sounds quite aggressive as a title, unintended, but I thought it sounded better than “Turn Sequence”! During your turn, you are able to do two actions from a selection of three. You can do the same thing twice if you would like to. The three actions are pretty basic; manoeuvre, attack or play a scheme card, but the “think” behind them is where this game really sings.

You start the game of Unmatched Battle Of Legends with five cards in hand, but to draw new cards you must either play a card with a “draw cards” action or manoeuvre. This is also the main way to move around the board and get yourself in prime battle position! As I said before, some characters will be able to attack provided they are in the same coloured zone as their target, but most characters need to be adjacent to launch an attack. You will want to get into the right position to strike but hopefully not leave your hero open if you do not have any defence cards in your hand.

Enter Battle Mode

When you are able to, you may play either a red attack card or a purple versatile card face down as an action. Your opponent may play a versatile or a blue defence card down if they have one to counter the attack. This is optional, they do not have to defend themselves. Then you simultaneously flip over the cards and resolve the effects. Starting first with the “immediately”, then the “during combat”. Mostly these effects will be adding to the attack or defence value by discarding cards etc. If both cards have effects to be resolved at the same time, then the defender’s card action goes first.

Next, the battle is resolved, if the attacking player has a higher attack value than what was used to defend, then the defending piece will take damage equal to the difference. If the defence value was higher than the attack, they have successfully defended, and taken no damage. Once this is resolved, you then resolve the “after combat” effects of the cards if there are any. These might involve further damage, movement, or drawing cards.

Regardless of where you are on the map, you are able to play a yellow scheme card as one of your actions. The scheme cards are all unique to the character you are playing and may be unique to your hero or sidekick too. Actions associated with scheme cards are powerful. The Jackalope has a scheme that lets it move through opposing pieces and then deal damage to an adjacent piece. Muldoon can remotely detonate a trap to cause damage to all adjacent pieces and allow you to draw a card. There is nothing that your opponent can do to counteract a scheme card, so these can really turn the tide for you.

First Round Strats

In the first round of Unmatched Battle Of Legends, you want to take a look at your starting hand and decide if you are going to play an attacking or defensive first round. Players who decide to play defensively will likely manoeuvre twice and draw two cards or else perhaps play a scheme card if one is really useful at that point. Ordinarily, as the first player, I would manoeuvre twice unless I have some monster attack cards I want to use.

Game End And Scoring

The game ends when there is only one hero left standing. You are knocked out when your hero is defeated, regardless of whether your sidekicks are still alive or not. There is no end scoring. It is a win or lose situation; I am simply looking at my enjoyment of the game. Because for me, win or lose, I have loved every game of Unmatched Battle Of Legends that I have played.

Introduction

Unmatched Battle of Legends Vol 1 is the first in the Unmatched system that was released. Containing Alice (of Wonderland fame), Medusa, King Arthur and Sinbad, this set is diverse in the way in which the characters each play as much as where in history or literature these characters come from.

Gameplay

This second opinion piece will focus more on areas that haven’t been discussed as much, but suffice it to say that I think that unmatched is brilliant and this box is a really great place to start. It has a set of four characters that are varying levels of complexity to play.

In Unmatched King Arthur has a lot of health and can hit very hard but you do really want to keep Merlin alive as long as you can. His special ability is a touch dangerous in that you can boost all attacks but this will mean you run out of cards quickly so you need to manage your deck well.

Medusa you can easily lose harpies, and they are well served as meat shields keeping your main character safe so she can attack with range and deal damage with her special ability of dealing damage to a fighter in her zone.

Sinbad is a slow starter but then as he has completed more and more voyages he is an utterly formidable foe. Dealing up to 7 damage from a single card providing there is no “feint-ing”. He can also move super fast around the board too with his boosted movement based on voyages. Towards the end there is no hiding from Sinbad, and you will need to dispatch him quickly to stay alive.

Finally, Alice (of Wonderland fame) who is in my opinion hard to play but I have seen lots of people instantly click and say it is easy. I guess it is the type of brain you have! Alice can be more defensive when she is small and more aggressive when she is big, but you must use the cards to change size. I think that is where my tiny brain gets befuddled, but I see the masterclass of a good commander behind the deck and she is a wondrous character.

Artwork And Components

I want to focus on one of the most notable things about Unmatched, which is the artwork. There is a load of effort putting into making the artwork on these cards pop. To the point where a few times I haven’t been ready to take my turn because I have been far too busy studying and enjoying the card art instead of strategizing my next move. Each character has beautifully thematic art taking over the top half of the card.

Across all the Unmatched sets the components are the same, mostly because I believe they got it right from the off. There is a double sided map offering you the choice between the garden from Alice in Wonderland or playing upon Sinbad’s ship. Despite now owning a huge array of

different sets with different maps, I always come back to these ones. They offer you places to hide from ranged characters, but they each have limited movement routes that allow you to trap characters too. They are four player maps, but I love playing with these at two as well. More space which makes it harder to get your hits but also means that you do run the risk of running out of cards and dying by your own hand if you play too defensively.

Aside from the map you have four characters each with their own mini, these I have seen look utterly amazing painted although I actually have enjoyed keeping mine grey so far. Alice has a beautifully illustrated big and small lock token that will help you keep track of which special ability you have. The other three; Sinbad,King Arthur and Medusa all have sidekicks. These are small plastic coin tokens that also have beautiful artwork on them.

Round up

If you are looking for a large spread of fun characters and diverse maps to play with the Unmatched system, then I honestly think that Restoration Games actually got it right from the off! Start with the OG Battle of Legends Vol 1 and you cannot go wrong. I love these characters and they suit the different playstyles.

Although the first, this set has been followed by both IP bangers and public domain characters over the past few years. Notable IP releases that you should check out are Marvel (King & Country, Brains and Brawn, Redemption Row, and Hell’s Kitchen) and Jurassic Park (T-Rex and Sattler, Raptors and Ingen)