The year is 1984 and 4 unlikely teenage pizza loving heroes came out of the shadows to protect the streets of New York. Named after 4 famous Italian artists, Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael and Michelangelo, Eastman and Laird’s heroes in a half shell captured the hearts and minds of fans for decades. Now, Restoration games have taken on these much-loved characters and dropped them into their latest adventure, an Unmatched Adventures board game.
Lifting the lid on the pizza box
If you have ever played Unmatched, or the previous Unmatched Adventures, you will pretty much know what you can expect. You will get some heroes, in this case our 4 beloved pizza loving turtles, each with their health dials, a deck of cards, a miniature to represent your hero of choice and a plastic token to represent the sidekick (also with a health dial).
The set also comes with 2 villains; the nefarious Shredder, and the rather gross but maniacal Krang. Both come with their own villain decks, miniatures, health dials and a variety of tokens for their particular mission. Unlike all other previous Unmatched instalments, we also have our first ever die, the Die of Ultimate Destruction, which is used for Krangs mission.
The board is double sided. One side represents New York and is the base for Shredders mission. The other side represents the Technodrome, where you will face off against Krang, trying to stop him from bringing dimension X into our world.
There are 6 minions in this box, they are essentially the sidekicks for your villains, and all your favourites are here; Beebop and Rocksteady, Baxter Stockman, Leatherhead, the Rat King, Wingnut and Slash. These are represented using plastic tokens, similar to the sidekicks, and all have their own deck of cards, health dials and applicable tokens.
Finally, you have your initiative and the allies and henchmen cards.
Instructions come in 3 parts. The standard Unmatched Core Rules, the set rules, which is the rules to outline the turtles abilities, and the adventures rules book, which explains how to set up a game and the unique requirements for either villain and the minions.
It seems like a lot of rule books, but honestly, they really won’t take you long to read through and digest. Better still, if you have played normal unmatched, you don’t even need to ready the core book at all.
Its ninja time
There are 3 ways to play this set.
Solo, co-operative or competitive.
Solo and co-operative both have you pitching yourself against a chosen villain with 1 or more of your favourite heroes. Where as competitively, you can pitch turtle against turtle, or if you have any other Unmatched sets, you can pit them against a range of other characters from a variety of franchises or classic characters.
First let’s look at the basics of Unmatched for those who have never played any sets in this fantastic franchise.
Each player picks a character, takes their associated deck, tokens, sidekick (if they have one), and health dial/s.
You pick a board to play, which consists of a series of connected colours circles representing zones and the paths you can travel between them. Follow the very straight forward set up rules, draw 5 cards and you’re good to go.
On a turn, you take 2 actions chose from the following options: manoeuvre, scheme or attack.
Manoeuvre – you draw a card, then choose to move if you want to move your hero, sidekick or both.
Scheme – play a scheme card, and follow the instructions, as written on the card. This can include things like drawing cards, moving, healing, gaining actions, to name but a few of the type of things that might appear.
Attack – is exactly how it sounds. You attack an opponent character, if you have a card you can play and are within range of them. Attacks are simple; both players pick a card (assuming both have one they can play), they are then revealed at the same time. You then have effects that could happen either immediately, during combat, or after combat. Compare the card values and the one with the highest wins. If the attacker wins, the defender takes damage. If you draw or the defender has the higher value, the defender wins. Apply effects during the correct timing, and that’s it.
It sounds simple, and that’s because it is. You will not find yourself reaching for the core rules for clarification very much after your first couple of games. Card effects, are not even tricky to understand, as Unmatched is very much a play it as it reads type game, if it says immediately cancel all effects, it means literally that, so the opponent doesn’t get to use their effects. This game is not allowing the rules to impede the fun that can be had!
Knowing these core basics also help with learning adventures. The core basics are the same. What changes is the turn order mechanics, how you deal with the game-controlled villains and the mission aspect of the adventures variation.
Turn order is determined by the use of initiative cards. These are shuffled and revealed one by one. Each card tells you what happens immediately and what happens at the end of a round. The immediate action is often just taking their turn. If it is a player card, the player plays as if they were playing any other game of Unmatched. If it is a villain or minion, the game has a simple decision mechanism. If they are next to players hero, they attack. If not, and they can reach a hero within their standard move, they will take the shortest route to that hero and attack. If you have choices? Then the players decide which way the minion or villain moves. If there is no player characters in reach of the villain or minion, then they do not move and threat counter moves up a space – and you don’t want that!
When they attack, the players pick a card (if they have one) as they would normally in Unmatched, and the top card from the villain or minion deck is revealed. All enemy cards are versatile, meaning they can be defence or attack cards, and have effects on them much like player cards. Attacks are then resolved as normal. If you are lucky, you may drawer the breaking news card, which has a 0 attack and 0 defence value, but this then triggers a reshuffle of ALL, yes, all the villain or minion cards, refreshing their deck.
If the threat marker ever reaches the maximum point, it triggers a mission specific outcome which often ramps up the difficulty of the game.
Again, fans of the original Unmatched adventures will be very familiar with all of this, and so all you will be really learning is the new things for this set. New players however will not find it hard to get into the game and will be picking it up very quickly.
Extra Toppings
For those who backed the Kickstarter campaign, or able to purchase a retailer purchased Kickstarter set, you can get some extra gameplay goodies. One of the extras is variation miniatures for the heroes and villains but also miniatures for the sidekicks and minions. Another item is token upgrades, and the most exciting thing, and possibly something that may make it to retail at a later date, is the hero decks for Shredder and Krang, allowing you to play competitively with those characters.
Cowabunga dudes!
As a fan of the Turtles, this was a must buy set. Each Turtle has their own unique characteristics, to capture their personalities. As with most Unmatched sets, the miniatures are great and the card art is awesome; the titles on the cards also hold plenty of nostalgic references for the fans.
As an Unmatched fan, Unmatched adventures was always a bit of a bargain set. A solo game, a co-op game and a standard Unmatched competitive set all rolled into one. Having a new Unmatched Adventures in the range is, as the Turtles would say, radical dude!
Combing a much-loved comic, cartoon and movie franchise (and that’s ignoring the scores of toys and games produced over the years) with a much-loved tabletop game series was always likely to be a winning formula, and Restoration Games has definitely scored a slam dunk with this set.
For fans of the Turtles, this is a great game, even if you are unfamiliar with Unmatched. There is plenty of nostalgia woven within a simple, but very well-designed board game and system. The variety means there is something in the set for a range of playing preferences. The game captures the heroes we know and love, and villains we hope to defeat.
For fans of the Unmatched series of games, you will either approach this as a TMNT fan, or an Unmatched Adventures fan, or… like all other Unmatched sets, just adding yet another set, with some new characters to play. Somehow, again, Restoration Games has managed to create a set of new characters that play in their own way and do not feel like they are reskinned existing characters from previous sets.
The only fall down of this game, is much like a lot of co-operative games, it can be somewhat difficult to win. We were lucky to win our first game, which says that Restoration Games have probably gotten a bit better at balancing the co-operative elements, such as the villain and minion difficulty. That said, it was still close. But that challenge, just means that the game won’t get boring. You won’t feel like victory is a given and will expect to fail on occasions.
This is a must buy in our opinion, and will definitely bring hours of fun for us.
About the author:
We are Peaches and Meeples, busy professionals who love to chill out to fun table top games. We love board games, card games, miniatures games, competitive or co-operative. Put some dice in our hands and we are in our happy place.
We are also proud guinea pig parents to two lovely fluffballs of joy.
