I have really been looking forward to Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze! It promised delivery in Aug 2023, but it arrived at my house sometime the week of October 15th: I think I was literally the last person of the Kickstarter to get it, because I already see it In Stock at places like Miniatures Market and GameNerdz. But I am not bitter. Really. I’m not!

I have been excited to get this because it adds a cooperative and solo mode to Unmatched: a very head-to-head skirmish game for 2 people (and 4 people if you squint, but the base UnMatched is really a 2-Player game).

I have been SO EXCITED for the coming of Unmatched Adventures, that I have been buying Unmatched sets so I can have a wide variety of the characters! If you look closely (above), you’ll see I have all the Marvel sets (I love Superheroes: see our Top 10 Cooperative Superhero Games) and Cobble and Fog with Sherlock Holmes (I love Detectives: see our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games). Honestly, I have been prepping for this day all year!!

UnMatched: Me vs Me

So, you have to understand, neither me nor my friends like skirmish and/or head-to-head games. None of my friends play Magic (well, Mark does) or any games of that ilk. Dice Throne is the closest thing to my friends like head-to-head games, but even then we prefer to play with the Dice Throne Adventures module which makes the game cooperative! See our Review of Dice Throne Adventures base game here and Dice Throne Adventures with Marvel characters here!

I’ve had a lot of these UnMatched sets for months, and no one (including me) was really interested in play them. I finally broke down one day and opened up Hell’s Kitchen so I could be ready to play UnMatched Adventures with Daredevil!

My first UnMatched game was a me vs me game of Daredevil vs. Bullseye. I basically alternated between the two characters, switching positions as I played. I kind of “pretended” I didn’t know what the other side would do (our Changing Perspectives Idea), and got through a couple of games to learn the mechanics.

UnMatched is a quick head-to-head game where you move around a board and fight, spoiling each others turns with great moves and great cardplay! It’s a back-and-forth game that’s over quickly: each game seems to be about 20-30 minutes in my experience. Bullseye won the first round, but I think Daredevil is harder to play well. We’ll see this again later …

First Battle

Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze comes with four characters you can play: Tesla, Golden Bat, Dr. Jill Trent, and Christmas Annie. Nope. I chose to play with Daredevil for my first game!

Why? I have literally no emotional attachment to any of the characters in the base box! But Daredevil? Bullseye? Electra? I was collecting comic books when Frank Miller did his run on first run on Daredevil, then his Electra stories, and Daredevil Born Again! Then later when Mark Waid took up the writing, I fell in love with Daredevil again! Just about the the entire reason I got UnMatched Adventures was to play Daredevil in a solo or cooperative adventure! Remember, me and my friends don’t like head-to-head games!

Included with the game are two scenarios: Mothman (see map above) …

.. and Martian Invaders (other side of the map).

Daredevil is a solo hero! It makes sense that he will take on the Mothman by himself!

Solo Play

So, congratulations to UnMatched Adventures for following Saunders’ Law and having a viable solo mode! And it is a true solo mode, where the solo player plays exactly one hero! To keep the play balanced with any number of heroes, UnMatched Adventures changes the scaling for solo mode in two ways.

First: The hit points for the main Villain scales by the number of heroes. In this case, Mothman has 10 x (the number of heroes) = 10 x 1 = 10 hit points to start the game. The more heroes there are, the more hit points the Villain has! See Mothman’s hit point dial above (should be 10).

Second: the number of Minions that help the main Villain are the same as the number of Heroes.  So, see above as the Tarantula minion (just one Minion for a one player game) helps the main villain!  The more Heroes there are, the more Minions there are!

This all fits together as the players have an initiative deck with one of each Hero, Villain, and Minion. This deck will be shuffled every round to determine the player order for that round.

Each scenario has a very different objective and set-up: see above as Daredevil plays in the world of Mothman! He has to keep the bridges from being destroyed! The win condition is generally always the same: take the main Villain to 0 hit points!

My first few solo games went south very quick. I was surprised how quickly the game played and how quickly I lost! I did remember that Daredevil was a little harder to play because of the way his deck works, so I played a few games as Bullseye to gain some confidence that the game can be beaten!

After a few games with Bullseye, I was able finally to beat the Mothman. One thing to note: it was very easy to play multiple games back-to-back because the game moves so quickly! It’s typically over in about 20 minutes! I retackled Mothman with Daredevil and was finally able to beat him!

I liked that this game was hard to beat out-of-the box. I had to play 5 or 6 games before I finally figured out a winning strategy, especially with Daredevil (who’s a little harder to play).

I then launched Daredevil into a solo game with The Martian Invader (see above) and Tarantula and did much better!

In case you were worried, Daredevil did save the world. Twice! I mean, that’s the name of this story: “Daredevil saves the World!“

Cooperative Play

So, I think the time on the side of the box is not quite right: it says 20-60 minutes.  I really feel like the solo game is 20 minutes, so that’s right.  But the cooperative game, since it scales by the number of players, should be 20 minutes per player! That more jibes with what we saw in our cooperative plays: “about 20-30 minutes per player”.   Our 4-Player game (see above) took about 2 hours.

I will say that I think this game is much stronger as a cooperative game than a solo game for a bunch of reasons.  

First of all, all the randomness we saw in the solo game seemed to be “smoothed out” more in the cooperative game!  This makes sense as more cards and more players just makes the game seem less punishing: the “randomness” we saw in the solo game was distributed over multiple good guys and bad guys, so the game felt less punishing.

There was also a lot of cooperation where we had to keep the Alien Fields under control: we talked a lot about “who would take the hit” (someone typically needs to discard a card when the Martians attack), but we also collaborated as to when we take the damage so the next person can clean up!  Such a simple combat system made this easy to talk and think about our strategy!

We also seemed to just have fun playing: see Sara and Teresa smiling as we play!  This is a fun but kinda silly game with Martians invading.  The game is simple enough that we don’t get stuck in the rules, but each player has enough “unique mechanisms” that each player feels “unique” and “involved” as we play.

In one cooperative game, in the final turns in the Martian Invader game just had us barely defeating the Martian Invader!  Daredevil got to play his “smart bomb” and do 8 damage on the penultimate turn to bring the win within reach!  It was a fantastic moment! The Electra crushed the final Martian with the Hand and we won!

I think this game is much stronger as a cooperative game than a solo game: It really does keep everyone involved and feeling unique, but with simple enough rules to keep the game flowing.

Zero Emotional Attachment

This gorgeous game comes with 4 Heroes I don’t think I’ll ever play. I have literally zero emotional attachment to any of them: Tesla was kind of a jerk, and I’ve never heard of the Golden Bat, Jill Trent, or Annie Christmas. Are they made up? As of right now, all of the base hero cards of UnMatched Adventures are still in shrink wrap. I am looking forward to trying out Cloak and Dagger, Ghost Rider, Spiderman, Dr. Strange, She-Hulk, Sherlock Holmes … ! I’d literally rather play a hero from any other UnMatched set than what’s included in UnMatched Adventures. The new heroes may be fantastic, but I just don’t have any emotional attachment to them the way I do every other character in UnMatched! ( I do admit, I might try Golden Bat, but only because he’s a Superhero).

I feel bad saying this, but I wish UnMatched Adventures came with 4 solo/cooperative Scenarios and no new heroes rather than 2 solo/cooperative Scenarios and 4 new heroes. I’d rather have spent my money on new Scenarios! Hopefully, this set does well so we will get some more Scenarios on the future.

Even in the cooperative game, when I gave everyone a chance to play “whomever they want”, we ended up playing Ghost Rider, Black Widow, Electra, and Daredevil.  Given a choice, I am not convinced people will ever want to play the heroes that come in the base box.

Having said that, I have heard that other people really do like the new Heroes. Caveat Emptor.

Setting Solo Expectations

So, I was very disappointed in my first few solo games of UnMatched Adventures! They were over quickly and felt very random. I was depressed how random they were!

And then I realized: this is how the head-to-head game feels! Players parry and feint and bluff and sometimes play devastating cards that destroy the opponent! If one player draws the right card at the right time, especially in the endgame, you can get completely devastated! It doesn’t feel random where you are playing head-to-head because it looks intentional: the other player plays cards on purpose. But the game looks random in head-to-head mode if you can’t see the other player! Cards come out “at random” and mess with you! So, that experience has been captured in the solo mode very well!

I think I was a victim of my own expectations: I wanted a complex framework to play Daredevil through many of the Adventures in UnMatched Adventures! That’s not what this is! The solo mode still feels like UnMatched: it’s a quick game with quick turns, quick play, and sometimes devastating and seemingly random card play! And that’s what I saw over about many games in this universe : a quick game with seeming randomness. But it was fun once I set my expectations!

We should actually be happy that the solo and cooperative game of UnMatched Adventures retain the quick feel of UnMatched! Recall that King of Monster Island (a cooperative game in the King of Tokyo Universe) was surprisingly more complicated than its competitive brethren King of Tokyo! See our Review here for more discussion! King of Monster Island was complicated enough that I had trouble recommending it to people would just wanted “a cooperative King of Tokyo“, because it was so much more!

In our case, I can recommend UnMatched Adventures to people who just want “solo or cooperative UnMatched“. UnMatched Adventures is just a little more complicated, but it still retains the feel of the base game.

If I want a quick 20 minute solo game with one of my favorite Marvel heroes fighting Mothman or Martian Invaders, UnMatched Adventures offers a quick solo or cooperative romp!

I do want to say that I did NOT have to lower my expectations for the cooperative game: UnMatched Adventures really knocked it out of the park (for cooperative play): it was quick, fun, engaging, simple, but still strategic.

Randomness

There is a lot of randomness in this game: let’s be clear. You have no idea what cards the Villain/Minions will draw, you have no idea what order the characters will get to play (it’s a random shuffle every round), you have no idea what special tokens will be drawn, and you have no idea if your attack or defense will be cancelled! Like we said above, this is just par for the course for this UnMatched, and that’s okay.

I would normally rage against this much randomness: recall how the randomness of the Trace rolls really downwardly influenced our rating of Tamashii: Chronicle of Ascend. (See our review here). The difference here is that UnMatched (and to a lesser extend, UnMatched Adventures) is a simple and quick game. If you get screwed by too much Randomness, oh well! It’s over quickly and you can play again! Tamashii was a 2-3 hour game where that extra spicy randomness could ruin a long and carefully planned game!

I will also point out that the randomness I saw in the solo game was significantly less pronounced in the cooperative game: there was just fewer opportunities to be overwhelmed by a random draw because there so many cards (bad guy cards and initiative cards).

Random Initiative Order

Just hear me out: I still hate the Random Initiative Order we see here (the Initiative Deck is reshuffled every round to re-order play), especially in the solo game. We’ve seen this same initiative mechanism in Aeon’s End and Adventure Tactics: see our discussion here in Seven House Rules for Cooperative Games. The problem is simply that the player(s) can get completely shut-out if the bad guys take all their turns at the end of a round and then start the beginning of the next round. For example, in a solo game, the solo player could have to wait 4 turns without being able to do anything … and meanwhile getting pummeled! ! It’s no fun, it feels unfair, and it can completely decimate the solo player.

One simple suggestion is to just keep the Initiative Order static so that they always come out in the same order. Another suggestion is to make it so the bad guys can never have more than 2 turns in a row: if the third turn would have the bad guys play, simply reshuffle until a player card is drawn.

Having said that, the cooperative play did not seem to have this same problem: the pathologically bad Initiative draws are much less likely to happen the more cards you have! So, as we played cooperatively, it just seemed like we never saw ourselves get completely screwed! Even if one character got beat up, there were still enough characters around to keep the game going.

Said another way, I think the solo game needs a mechanism to keep the Initiative cards from having pathologically bad draws, but I think the cooperative game has enough cards to mitigate this effect without needing anything special.

Conclusion

UnMatched Adventures is a gorgeous production with amazing minis, amazing components, good rulebooks, and a really good insert that holds everything. The production is outstanding and it is a sight to behold: see above.

Would I recommend buying UnMatched Adventures by itself if you just want the solo/cooperative game? I don’t know? For the solo game, probably not, at least without a few fixes (see our discussions above about the Initiative deck). The solo game is pretty good, but you need to set your expectations a little. On the other hand, the cooperative game was fantastic out-of-the-box and we had so much fun playing! I would strongly recommend the game for the cooperative experience!

Unfortunately, neither me nor my friends had any emotional attachment to any characters that come in the box, so I would recommend picking up an UnMatched set where you like the characters (Cobble and Fog, Hell’s Kitchen, etc) if you want to play in this universe. I really wish UnMatched Adventures had contained 4 solo/cooperative Scenarios (instead of just the 2 Scenarios and the 4 new Heroes), but I suppose it would be too hard to sell just an expansion without any Heroes (although, technically Dice Throne Adventures did and it worked just fine).

Just make sure you set your expectation to what this is: the solo game game is a quick and furious game of UnMatched, but the cooperative game really shines! This game can still be pretty random, but that’s okay for a fun-filled romp of 20-60 minutes (well, realistically 20-30 minutes per player)! Once I set my expectations, I enjoyed it much more. UnMatched Adventures: Tales To Amaze takes UnMatched and makes it solo/cooperative without giving up the spirit and feel of the game.

This wasn’t quite what I expected, but it was still fun. Objectively, this is probably a 9/10 for the cooperative game, but I may just call it a 7/10 for the solo game. But I still had fun!