Unmatched: Tales to Amaze

I came to this skeptical. Unmatched’s whole appeal for me has always been the head-to-head read, watching a hand of cards, guessing what the other fighter’s about to pull, and a co-op retrofit onto a system built for that kind of duel sounded like the sort of thing publishers do to squeeze one more box out of a line rather than something that would actually hold up. Tales to Amaze mostly proved me wrong.

The four new fighters, Annie Christmas, Nikola Tesla, Golden Bat, and Jill Trent, are drawn from American folklore and pulp corners I didn’t know much about going in, which is its own small pleasure, and every one of them plays as a full, legitimate Unmatched character in the regular competitive game too, not a co-op-only afterthought. That’s the part that actually earns my respect here, the designers didn’t just skin some generic heroes onto boss-fight mechanics, they built characters whose kit has to hold up on both sides of the box. Tesla in particular is a genuine banger in straight 1v1, worth the price of admission even if you never touch the cooperative mode.

The co-op itself against Mothman or the Martian Invader, backed by a rotating cast of minions like the Jersey Devil and Skunk Ape, is where the seams show a little. It’s swingy, more than the competitive game, since the villain AI is a deck of cancel effects and forced discards rather than a person making choices, and with the wrong minion combo the whole thing can turn into everyone discarding cards and going nowhere for a couple of turns. Fun with two, fine with three, and I’d stop there, since the ratio of “your turn” to “watching the villain deck do its thing” gets worse the more people you add.

Component quality is what you’d expect from the line at this point, sturdy, and I do wish there were a few more villain types in the box, two main bosses feels thin against eight minions worth of variety. But as a co-op reskin of a system that had no obvious business supporting one, this is a genuinely clever transformation, elegant enough that even people who’ve bounced off vanilla Unmatched might find something here worth a second look.