Unmatched: Houdini vs Genie

I love the Unmatched series and was so excited to get the newest magical offering! Magic and tricks galore, let’s see what Unmatched: Houdini Vs Genie has to offer!

Preparing The Magic

Houdini Vs Genie is a 2 character set for Unmatched with a double sided board. Houdini has a side kick, Bess. The Genie does not.

Set up is the same as the other Unmatched sets, which I’m sure you’re familiar with by now.

I’ll start by saying that overall we found the characters really fun to play. The magical elements really lend to some interesting gameplay and while you’ll see through my review what a strong fighter The Genie is, I have beaten him with Houdini as well.

The artwork is great. On the card backs they focussed on the hands, which for Houdini are escaping from chains and for The Genie, his hands are removable.

The Magician’s Circle

Houdini is a Melee hero with a starting health of 14 and the ability to move 2. Bess his side kick, has a starting health of 5. He also has his ongoing ‘Escape artist’ power – When you take the manoeuvre action and boost, you may place Houdini in any space instead of moving.

Houdini is all about changing things at the last minute, making it harder for your opponent to plan. His above power coupled with Cards like ‘For my next trick’ and ‘Sleight of hand’ allow you to do the unexpected and keep moving around. ‘For my next trick’ allows you after combat to ‘Move one of your fighters up to 1 space. Draw 1 card. Gain 1 action.’ Pretty handy when played as your last action, you not only got an attack in but were able to move away afterwards, draw a card and either move further or play another card. ‘Sleight of hand’ I look at as a placeholder card. It’s another attack card but one I played when I wanted to see what my opponent would play first. It reads ‘You may return this card to your hand and choose a different card to play. Resolve all effects on that card as normal’. Very handy to prevent you wasting your best attack card if your opponent had played a feint for example.

There are also ‘Boost bonuses’ on Houdini and Bess cards throughout the deck. Whenever you choose to use one of these cards to boost, you get to use the bonus effect. Examples of these are: gaining an action, drawing a card or dealing damage to an opponent.

All Powerful Being

The Genie is a ranged hero with a starting health of 16. He has the ongoing ‘Infinite Power’ power – At the start of your turn, you may discard 1 card to gain 1 action.

The Genie has the ability to draw lots of cards and as mentioned above can discard these to gain extra actions. When The Genie uses ‘Back in the lamp’ he can also recover 4 health. This means the Genie has to work quickly as while he’s very powerful he could run out of cards quicker than other fighters if they can out run him.

He has a strong scheme card of which he has 3 in the pack – ‘Three Wishes’. This allows a choice of draw 5 cards, each opponent discards 2 cards or for the rest of the turn your cards’ values are all 4 and cannot be changed.

As with all unmatched heroes, finding the right timing for playing their cards, based on the opponent, is key.

A Map Of Secrets

The map in Unmatched: Houdini Vs Genie is called ‘King Solomon’s Tomb’ and it features lots of secret passages. This is a feature we’ve seen before and something that seemed to work well when playing with Sherlock Holmes or Dracula. It works with these fighters too, especially for Houdini to aid him popping up here, there and everywhere!

Whilst the map is double sided, it is the same map both sides but with the full colours on the circles one side, the other side the circles are just rimmed with the colour as we’ve seen before. This feels a shame as I think it would have been much more worthwhile to have a different map to play on.

The Whole Bag Of Tricks

Overall, I really enjoyed Unmatched: Houdini Vs Genie. I would actually say it’s one of my favourites. This is largely down to the theme appealing to me, but we have some interesting new mechanics, Houdini, who can be very tricky to get your hands on and finally The Genie, who can hit hard and fast with an extra action every turn when played like this. Even when you have a successful attack on The Genie, he has a lot of cards that deal damage afterwards to the attacker anyway!

I thoroughly recommend adding this magical set to your Unmatched collection.