Ultimatch is a light cooperative card game from Fireside Games.  This was NOT on Kickstarter: I ordered this directly from the Fireside Games web site.

This is a super light cooperative card game for 1-5 Players, taking 10 minutes to play, for ages 10+.   

Unboxing

This … is pretty small.  It’s a deck of 48 colorful cards, 5 Player Aids, and a pamphlet (sigh) of instructions.  See the box above and below (with a Can of Coke for perspective).

The cards are very colorfully labelled numbers 1-8 in six colors: 6 * 8 = 48 cards.  See above.

The pamphlet isn’t great, but it does teach the game.  See above and below.

Probably the most important part of the instructions are how to make a match … see the nice graphic on the back of the rule sheet.

This same match information is replicated on the Player Aid cards. Once you have the game down, it moves real quickly, but this Player Aid is quite nice to have.

There’s not much else to it!

Gameplay

Players make a pyramid of cards and try to make matches (on revealed cards) to slowly eat away those cards, until all the cards in the pyramid are gone!  If you matched ALL the cards in the pyramid, you win!  If you run out of cards (in your hand) on the way, you lose!  See above at the starting game!

As the game progresses, you remove cards from the pyramid: you can only match and remove the revealed cards. Once you match a card, you take it away.  If you ever take away both cards covering the level above, you flip the new card!   Think 7 Wonders Duel! See above as we have uncovered the leftmost card …we can now flip it so it can take part in matches!

To get rid of cards out of the pyramid, you must make matches.  You can match in one card: either the color or the number.  In the example above, the player hand is at the bottom: the green 6 can either match the Green 2 (color) at the bottom or the red 6 (number)!  Sometimes, you need two cards to match: in which case you can do math and add/subtract!

For example, Yellow 7 – Blue 5 is Green 2 … so that’s a match!

It turns out you can also combine colors (additively) to match! So the match above: BLUE + YELLOW = GREEN would also match!

Ultimatch

The reason this game is called Ultimatch: if you match BOTH color AND Number, then you get a special match called The Ultimatch!  You strive for The Ultimatches!  Why?  Because you start the game with a limited number of cards, and the Ultimatch is the ONLY WAY to get more cards!  When you make the Ultimatch, you discard both cards (and the card from the pyramid), but you get 2 cards back!  

Your life is about to change.  All you do is look for is the Ultimatches once you start playing this game.

Solo Play

Kudos to Ultimatch for having a solo mode (and following Saunders’ Law)! 

The solo player is given 13 cards (see the bottom) and told to get going!  The only new cards the solo player can ever get is from making Ultimatches, so the solo player tries to find all the Ultimatches he can!

I played 5-6 solo games in a row: it was so easy! Ultimatch really is about 10 minutes long per game.  But, I made mistakes, I forgot rules, but after about 5 games, I was starting to see some of the strategies: primary colors tend to be more valuable than composite colors because you can combine primaries to make composites, but not the other way around!   And it’s better to match with 1 card if possible!  And there’s all sorts of little things you learn.

Part of the fun of Ultimatch is playing a bunch of games quickly to discover some of the strategies.

I could easily see playing this solo while waiting for some friends to come over … it’s just so quick!

Cooperative Play

But I think this game shines in cooperative mode.  It’s also a little harder:

• There’s a trade phase you have to think carefully about
• You can’t share information about what’s in your hand
• You CAN share the Alta-hand and talk about how you might use the Alta-hand

The Alta-hand is a shared group of 3-5 cards (see photo above, the Alta-Hand is below the pyramid).  The players share the cards in the Alta-Hand: they can use those cards (as well as the unshared cards in their hands) to make matches.  Managing this resource (Alta-Hand) is key to winning.

We found, after losing quite a bit, that the trade action (action 1, “Trade A Card“: see above) is quite important! It allows people, who may not have an Ultimatch, to offer cards that may help.  It does double duty: a trade may give you an Ultimatch, but it may just be sharing information about the cards available.

Just like the solo game, we had to play multiple times to start figuring out a winning strategy.  But since the game is SO QUICK, it’s easy to try a bunch of hands and start developing strategies.  One strategy that worked for us was trying to get primary colors in the Alta-Hand!

Bandersnatch, Cumberpatch, Smoochy-Pants

The funniest thing happened: my friend, while looking at the scene above asked me:

“What’s the big matchee thingee called again? Ulti-smash?”
“Um, it says on the back of the cards. It’s the name of the game.”

From that moment on, the name of the game changed and morphed into Bandersnatch, Cumberpatch, Smoochy-Pants and many other variants!

The game is so light and fluffy that it’s easy to have some conversation going while you are playing! So, the name of the game devolved into the funniest variants of  the word Ultimatch we could think of!  We joked as we played.

I think this is a real feature of the game: it’s offers a challenge, but it’s still light enough you can have fun conversation going around the table.  And it’s cooperative, so you don’t hate each other like you do after a game of Uno.

Reactions

Generally, everyone liked the game!  But not everyone.

CC: “It was elegant, simple, easy to learn, challenging but not impossible to win, quick to set up and put away. Solid nine. Only thing missing is a theme or some kind and a way to vary play for some more replayability. I plan to pick it up.”

Joe: “Game 8/10, Name 10/10”

Kurt: “It was cute but not something I’d gravitate to. Maybe a 6? I’d play it but I wasn’t wowed by it.”

Rich: “Good times.  Solo game was pretty good: 7/10.  The cooperation really shone through in the multiplayer game: 8.5/10”

Conclusion

If you want to replace Uno with a light card game that’s cooperative, Ultimatch might be what you are looking for.  It’s easy to learn, easy to teach, and is quick to play.  We found ourselves wanting to play over and over to hone our strategies in the game.  

Ultimatch is light enough to have fun conversation going on while you play: we ended up trying to come up with funny variations of the name: Bandersnatch, Cumberpatch, Smoochy-Pants!  That was suprisingly fun.   Ultimatch is fun: you’ll find yourself playing multiple times to try to win!

Good times.