Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze review— I’m amazed

Ever since I bought my first Unmatched set back when Battle of Legends dropped, I’ve been screaming from the rooftops about how good the game is, and with a couple exceptions, every set has been top-shelf. It’s made my job since I started reviewing them pretty easy, so I had been spicing it up by judging how well each set serves as an entry point to the series. Well, that doesn’t really work for Tales to Amaze, since it’s definitely the box I’m going to be steering newcomers to moving forward.

The elevator pitch for Tales is that it’s the first entry in the Unmatched Adventures line, which welds co-op mode onto the already excellent core rules. Pick which of the big bads you’re playing against between the Martians and Mothman, grab minions equal to the number of heroes, and wail on those baddies with your buddies. Hopefully you kill Mothman before he’s completed his anti-bridge vendetta, or the aliens before there’s more of them in any given field than corn stalks, but y’all are going to have a ball either way. The real selling point here is you can toss in any of the previously released characters and, despite some occasional awkwardness, they generally work great.

Turn order is randomized by the initiative deck, which will have at least one card for each player and enemy in play. Enemy turns are a breeze; they move their initiative card’s move value towards the nearest player fighter and attack them if they wound up adjacent. Defending a monster attack works similar to defense in regular Unmatched, toss an appropriate card from your hand into the combat if you feel like defending, flip the top card of the attacking monster’s deck for its attack card, and resolve combat as normal.Player turns are where it gets a bit weirder- since monsters don’t actually have hands, discard effects just mill cards off their deck with the understanding that if a monster’s deception card would ever hit their discard pile, you shuffle it all back into their deck; a definite decrease in value. Additionally, since they aren’t making any decisions for themselves, cards that give enemies a pick of effects are blanked and players make decisions on other cards, buffing previously self-damaging cards like Invisible Man’s opponent moves a fog token cards into beneficial ones. The most off-putting change has got to be how there aren’t any valid targets for hero and sidekick specific effects, making those cards near-useless. Once the initiative deck has been emptied, the round ends with monster’s end of round effects, universally detrimental to the players, and frequently advancing the threat token, ushering in a loss for the table. Each game, you’ll be playing with a different combination of bosses, minions, and characters, so combined with the multiplicative nature of this many decks, I haven’t reached a point of “solving the puzzle”. Even if you do, the game comes with Amazing Event cards, which buff the game’s difficulty. There’s a lot to be said about the introduction of a good co-op mode to Unmatched, but my favorite is how the elimination of fatigue victories recontextualizes card draw effects alongside the addition of more allies makes multi target buffs much more valuable, which combines to make characters that were bottom of the barrel in competitive actually viable in the new format.

I hear you saying, “OK Nick, the co-op is good, but you said this is the best point of entry for new Unmatched players; if they’re going to be playing Unmatched mostly competitively, why are they starting here?” That would be a good question, but both of the co-op maps can be played competitively, and even if you completely ignore the co-op stuff, this is easily my favorite four-character set. Tesla’s chock-full of effects that trigger off proper management of his coils’ charge. Golden Bat’s ability adds two to the value of his attacks if he hasn’t maneuvered that turn, which combined with his card’s movement effects turns him into an absolute beastick and terror for other melee characters that would otherwise want to live in his face. Annie Christmas feels the most like a fixed King Arthur, a melee hero with high values and a ranged sidekick, only that Charlie isn’t made out of paper and won’t die to a stiff wind like Merlin does. Dr. Jill Trent starts each of her turns choosing between her blaster or healing tonic, which blind boosts your attacks off your opponent’s deck if your printed value is lower than theirs or heals you for one whoever it’s higher, respectively.

See below for our list of partners and affiliates: