Unmatched: Stars and Stripes review

I guess it's inevitable that Unmatched would eventually feel like it's stumbling a bit, especially if you’re like me and choose to put the Buffy set into the same memory hole Rise of Skywalker lives in. Not that it has become bad by any means, just that the characters have started to more frequently hit a Smash Bros Fox/Falco echo fighter space rather than the constant innovation that initially made me so impressed by Unmatched's design team. Not that I blame anyone; once you've a character count past 50, it's going to be damn near impossible to make each one feel entirely unique. Point being, I guess I was wrong to assume that Unmatched's best days are in the rear-view? Because Stars and Stripes is as close to a perfect set as we're going to get, with the character and map designs as a whole easily surpassing anything we've got so far.

Even the best sets always had a clunker I could write off as a handicap for people who play a lot to use against newcomers (Hamlet, Jekyll/Hyde, Arthur, Annie Christmas, you get the idea), but Stars and Stripes is nothing but good, old-fashioned, high-quality Unmatched card-slinging. John Henry is as close as we get to an old design, with his power ramp and insane movement calling back to Sinbad's Voyages, but separated into two between his Ability to drop track on spaces, which he then gets to ignore during movement, and Hammer cards' effects that key off how much he moved that turn. Rosie is an aggro beater that requires a bit of finesse, as the four parts of her mech suit power up in order but turn off if all four are active at the end of her turn. Of course, she's got plenty of cards that help manage activating and deactivating to ramp her up faster and keep her from going back to her mediocre baseline, making her play a trade-off between getting everything online quicker or turning off that problematic fourth system and staying at peak performance.

The other two are even more skill-intensive; Wyatt Earp has a charcuterie of effects he can trigger whenever he or Doc Holliday successfully attacks on top of a plethora of card effects. George Washington is tricky to play as and against, as his most powerful effects are tied to spending Ruse tokens, which opponents can cancel by randomly discarding cards. Extra spicy, 'cause he can spend a Ruse on a card that doesn't need the token as a ruse to bait out a Feint or discard on an empty card. Ghost-pepper-spicy that the correct counterplay to the Ruse effects is so divergent: the 3-attack that ignores defense values is effectively blanked by a 0-defense heal 3, but the 3-attack that has the opponent discard two if successful can be thwarted by a bog-standard 3-defense, and the 4-attack that deals an additional 7 if successful just needs to be canceled or have a huge defense dropped on it. That's just the heart of what makes Unmatched fun cranked up to 11, right?

The maps are great as well. The White house is a series of small one-zone rooms with secret passages that bounce you between the corners with a large two-zone outdoors area that's waiting to become a ballroom with Escher architecture. The Alamo is more normal, but it's up there with the Globe as one of my favorite no-gimmick maps. If I had one utterly minuscule critique: I'm not in love with how The Alamo uses two yellows for zones—but let's be honest, the patterns make it fine.