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Fig 01: There’s a lot of fun packed into this box - and look at all the artwork!
Everybody’s loving a mash-up these days, but I dunno, I’m not so sure I’m in favour. Godzilla and Kong in a movie together, that basically works, what with them both being great big creatures and whatever. I can accept it. Aliens and Predator, okay, although the first film was a bit bland and the second one is an atrocity. The comics work because their lore blends together fairly well. But people can get a little slap-happy with it. I’ve seen Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles dressed up as characters from He-Man - why do those things go together? Nonsense. Family Guy and the Simpsons? Two outstaying-their-welcome wrongs don’t make a right. Cola and mango? What are you people thinking?
Okay, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is obviously tremendous fun. And Robocop versus Terminator is a comic you should definitely read. And the Arrowverse worked pretty well (shame it got cancelled)...
Maybe I’m more into this mash-up thing than I thought.
If you’re here, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Unmatched, a competitive game for 2-4 people where you take control of a famous figure from history or fiction and pitch them against… whoever’s up for it. The available characters come in loosely themed boxes of 2-4 options, each with a miniature, a deck of cards specific to them, and either a sidekick or some form of additional playing pieces.
What’s different about Tales To Amaze, then? It’s actually quite a monumental shift into the world of cooperative gameplay. It’s you and your buddies versus an AI enemy - also another first for the series.
Let’s have some first impressions.
Consider me amazed.
From the moment I laid eyes on the box, I was excited for what lay in store. There’s stunning artwork on the front of the box, on the back, on the sides, with every hero and villain featuring somewhere in work that should honestly be assembled in an artbook.
They’ve got the pulp vibe down perfectly. If this was a series of books or graphic novels I would definitely read it one after another. I’d watch the movies. I’d listen eagerly to the radio serialisation. Just give it to me.
Fig 02: Martian invasion underway! Keep watch on the fields…
The joy continues as you delve into the contents of the box. The miniatures are outstanding - and I’ve come to find that this is par for the course for the Unmatched series. There is plenty of fine detail, and the poses are all dynamic and full of character. Wait until you see Mothman, a tremendous beast! I couldn’t stop looking at any of them. Of all the games I either own or that have passed through my fingers since I started this hobby half a year ago, these are by far the best miniatures I’ve seen. If the Other Half would let me, I’d keep them out on the shelf (she’s not keen on Mothman, as we’ve had a weird month or so wherein the creature keeps cropping up in everything we watch or read).
Everything else is of equally enjoyable quality. The cards are thick, they feel nice, and the artwork is as amazing as on the box. Each hero and villain has their own deck, and it’s incredible that they have their own individual art style and yet they’re still unified under the Unmatched banner. All player and enemy pieces are colour coordinated which makes set up and play so much easier. The health dials are really cool, once you’ve assembled them (not easy with sausage fingers: I fired bits off left, right and centre before I was done).
First playthrough
In case you couldn’t tell, I’ve never played Unmatched before, I’m new to the series with this entry. If you’re new like me, then you’ll need a little patience (unlike me), as the game comes with three rulebooks. Yeah. There’s the core rules, the set rules, and the specific Tales To Amaze instructions. You will need all three to play. This was slow going for me, as it meant a fair bit of bouncing back and forth to find where everything fits together. You need to know the core rules from the standard competitive version of Tales To Amaze so you know how to move, fight and use the cards from your deck. You need the set rules (a small booklet really) so you know a few rules specific to the figures from this box. The TTA instruction book tells you how to run the AI enemies and how this cooperative version differs. Proceed with confidence, however, as this will all click. This is actually the first game I’ve played for some time where there are no rules missing from the rulebooks and none of the rules present are muddy. Your experience will be even easier if you’ve played Unmatched before.
A quick sidebar regarding a feeling I had while setting up and as I started playing: I found the atmosphere to be a genuine surprise. This wouldn’t apply to Unmatched in general, but TTA in particular has a very similar feel to Horrified. It’s the look of the board and the cryptids and the mechanics of each game, in particular the ever-progressing threat track. There’s one major difference between TTA and Horrified: the tension in the latter can rapidly dissipate once a monster is dispatched, whereas in Tales To Amaze it seems to increase. But we’ll get deeper into that later.
When I write a review, I usually like to go over my first playthrough, as this is where I get the greatest sense of how well I’ll get on with a game, how well did it flow, what issues did I have with the rules, did I have any clue what was going on etc. In this instance, my first five to ten minutes I was constantly going from one rulebook to another, and I feared this would endure for the entire game, but the narrow focus of the turns really helps in this regard. You move, you scheme or you attack. The enemy either attacks if you’re next to them, moves and attacks if a player is in range, or if no player is near enough to reach, the threat track advances. (This is an excellent way to prevent players running permanent circles around the enemy: if you don’t get stuck in for a fight, you will lose, and that can happen quicker than you might think.)
Fig 03: Every single character in the Unmatched series has super-thematic cards and pieces. Colour coordination is everything, dear.
I set up the first time round with Mothman, The Bob and Ant Queen as my enemies, and Tesla and Jill as my player characters - with this being a co-op game, it lends itself very easily to solo play. Mothman is an incredibly imposing presence on the board, towering above the good guys. It’s a figure that gives a real sense of the task before you: if I saw this bad boy swooping towards me across a midnight bridge I’d be long gone.
The aim of the game is to get the opponent’s HP down to zero, so I lunged in for the attack as much as possible. A little too much, as it turns out. You start with five cards. Some are attack, some defend, some can cover both, and some are scheme cards that trigger an ability or event. When you use one of your two actions to attack, both you and your opponent play a card (although the defender doesn’t have to if they have nothing suitable). Once modifiers etc are taken into account, highest number wins, and that amount is taken from the loser’s health wheel. When you attack, when you defend, you’re using cards, so the number in your hand dwindles rapidly. You automatically gain a card when you move as an action. (Some cards also allow you to gain additional cards when played.) You can already see the mistake I made in my first game, then. I rattled through my hand too quickly instead of taking a moment here and there to jig about the board.
Tesla took a beating, particularly from The Blob whose habit of leaving acid splats in its vicinity - along with one especially devastating card - caused absolute havoc. Some of the damage my character received was down to my own foolish mistake. If you run out of cards you are considered ‘exhausted’ and you immediately lose two health. Not great when your health wheel is practically spinning double-time towards zero. To make matters worse, Tesla found himself cornered by a teleporting Mothman who dealt the final blow. The threat track advanced rapidly as tokens racked up on the bridges and I forgot completely to deal with them. Meanwhile, I was surprised by how strong Dr Jill was. She initially struggled with the Ant Queen, then abruptly landed a couple of powerful attacks that took the insect down, and quite honestly it was a thrill. I was swept up in the story of the battle. The card art really helps, placing you right inside the environment and the personalities of these combatants. She swept in afterward to get revenge against The Blob (fist-punch the air!), then followed a swelteringly tense face-off and dance around the board with Mothman, but it was a rally too late: the final bridge fell.
The tension, the swings in fortune, the highs and lows, the twists and turns, a cliffhanger ending, it all left me keen for more. One item of information from the instructions rang clear in my head: of the two big bads, Mothman is intended to be the least challenging. It’s a tough game, then, tougher than I’d expected. Bring it on!
Fig 04: Every card is fantastic to look at! Except for when Mothman plays one that cancels out your own…
Second playthrough
After getting ruined by Mothman, I approached the Martian with some trepidation. I knew I needed to seriously up my tactical game. You can’t simply charge in there and remain on the spot, swinging a bat. In and out. Tag team it. Manage the threats. Defend the bridges or clear the fields, depending on which side of the board you’re playing (there’s a dedicated side and specific tasks for each opponent). Don’t let the threat tokens mount up, or it will be a very short game! Talk between yourselves - this applies equally if you’re playing solo. This last element is new to the series with Tales to Amaze, as here it is wise to show each other your cards so that you can plan appropriately. I mean, you could play a house rule variant wherein the players keep their cards to themselves, but good luck to you.
Here we go with Martian Invader, Skunk Ape (who?) and the Jersey Devil versus Annie Christmas and the Golden Bat. That’s a real late-night movie showdown if ever I hear one. It was actually a couple of days after my first playthrough, yet even with my sieve of a brain the set up was much quicker and I felt familiar with the rules. Again, I’m dazzled by the minis and the card artwork, top marks to the graphic designers on this game.
Annie has a ripper of a start - she moves to pick up an extra card, then launches an opening attack on Martian Invader, proving herself to be tremendously powerful. The downside is that invaders land in the fields straight after. Too many of these will cause the threat track to advance faster and faster, so I must remember this time to deal with them quickly. Each hero gets some good digs in today, but Skunk Ape - a real powerhouse, as I discovered - pulls a problematic card, ‘Gruesome Lure’ which gives Golden Bat a lot of issues. Jersey Devil, on the other hand, is full of little tricks that make life a good deal harder. One in particular is a nasty surprise if you have a large discard pile when it is pulled, and it threw me through a loop.
I felt as if I was playing a lot better this second time around, manoeuvring more and using card effects to get more cards into my hands. (You really don’t want to run out of cards regularly, it’s a sign that your game plan is failing.) I’m learning that this is a game of nimble tactics: rigid, repetitive strategies will not pay off. And a spanner lands in my works: Annie goes through a series of rounds where all she draws is strategy cards. I struggle to adjust: for a time she has to back away from the fight.
My usual lack of observance was in full effect here. I was some way into the game when I realised that the threat track on Martian Invader’s board is shorter! No wonder this is considered to be a tougher challenge.
There was an insanely close finish. A run of incredible good fortune saw all three enemies draw the ‘deception’ card one after another - wherein they take no action but shuffle their discard pile back into the main deck instead. Annie’s sidekick Charlie got ganged up on and murdered (laters, Chuck), Golden Bat went on a rampage through Skunk Ape and Jersey Devil, and it took every ounce of effort to take down Martian Invader who got more and more powerful as the invasion went on. Again, we’d had the ups and the downs, the strategies that paid off, the surprises out of nowhere, and the dramatic final confrontation. Every minute had been tremendous fun, and it feels like there is lots to learn and plenty of ways to improve.
Does it work solo?
Like the majority of co-op games, yes, this works great solo as you can dual-wield (or triple-wield) characters versus the automated enemy. This is far from the first game to employ such a system: I’ve already compared Tales To Amaze with Horrified which is obviously a big game in this particular sphere. The nature of Unmatched and the rulebook gave me pause for thought, however. I got the sense that this would be a case of the rules dictating that the monsters make a beeline for any player in sight and attack with blunt and mindless swings. Surely Mothman would act exactly the same as The Blob and the Ant Queen?
Um, nope. The individual card decks and specific initiative rules result in profound differences in the enemy personalities. This is especially impressive given that the decks only average eight cards, and yet they can cause amazing levels of havoc, reinforcing the feeling of a frantic and unpredictable battle. As in the example from my first playthrough, The Blob has an insatiable, brainless drive and spits out a trail of acid spurts that drove Tesla backwards towards Mothman, who had tricks appropriate for a legendary cryptid and managed to pin Tesla into a corner. Without The Blob’s antics this wouldn’t have happened. A different villain would have created a different outcome
Fig 05: Look at this incredible beast! It’s the last thing that Tesla saw…
Do the B-movie stylings lead to A star entertainment?
Yes. I’m all in on this. Almost every review I do, I discuss one specific sign that tells me whether or not a game is great: do I think about it in the hours and days after I play it? That’s an affirmative for Unmatched: Tales To Amaze. I wonder how Invisible Man from Cobble and Fog will fair against Mothman. I wonder which set I should buy next to mix up with this. I wonder if a rematch against Martian Invader will be as close. I wonder why I didn’t get into this sooner. If you’ve enjoyed Unmatched before now and already have a set or two, then Tales To Amaze will be both familiar and refreshing and will give you countless options to play. If you haven’t plunged in yet but you’re a co-op fan, then this is where you need to be.
A warning, though: for days afterwards you’ll be dreaming in classic B-movie posters of movies that should exist. Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Mothman? Anything is possible in the world of Unmatched…
(Sherlock Holmes and Invisible Man available separately.)
Scores
Score – 90%
Artwork – 5
Complexity – 2
Replayability – 5
Player interaction – 5
Component Quality – 5
You might like:
The challenging gameplay
The phenomenal artwork
The mix-and-match possibilities
You might not like:
If you only enjoy competitive - this is co-op all the way
