Remember 2015? After Exploding Kittens brought the perverse, off-beat, cult, hipster humour of The Oatmeal web comic to the “Take-That” card game space (exploding Kickstarter in a fireball of fur and frenzy by reaching over 8 million dollars in backing in a little over a month), countless other game companies have tried hard to reproduce the award-winning formula. That iconic, twisted, cute-but-feral art style with its almost-but-not quite NSFW jokes have such a zeitgeisty feel for millennials raised on The Simpsons or Family Guy, now often with families of their own. Who among that demographic has not spent hours fruitlessly arguing with the next generation since then that 2000s high irony is “just so much better than all this Gen Z/Alpha sincerity we are now swamped with”? God, the kids just don’t understand! (Slams door, opens craft IPA, and puts on that old CD by The Shins or whatever Pitchfork likes and sinks into nostalgia). Wasn’t Exploding Kittens just so on point for the age of skinny jeans, bomber jackets, and ironic man-buns? It’s no surprise that the success of Exploding Kittens generated so many imitators. But do any of them transcend that epoch-defining experience of late nights forcing friends to face down a ticking feline-H-bomb while they drop their own F-bombs in panic, and hunt through their hand for that elusive Defuse card?
You’re here on Zatu. You know what I mean. Oh happy days, so long ago…
Well, I can say there is one game I know that comes very close to this experience. Within a horsehair’s breadth, at least. Maybe even under the right conditions creating something magical and special, like a rainbow, that exceeds in heat and light the beauty of detonating moggies: Unstable Unicorns. A game where majestic, wonderous, mystical unicorns are revealed for what they really are. Just utter bastards, really.
How-To-Play
In Unstable Unicorns, two to eight players take turns to build an army of seven Unicorns by drawing from a central deck, while trying to stop their opponents beating them to the punch (the hoof?)
In pursuit of their goals players can draw different types of “Upgrades” affecting their “Stable” (the play area in front of each player into which cards are played to trigger their effects), “Downgrades” affecting their opponents, and Magic cards that have instant effects that temporarily alter the game rules, cause damage, or create boons – like “destroy a Unicorn card” (Unicorn Poison), or return a card from each players “Stable” to their hand (Glitter Tornado).
Players start with seven cards in their hand and a Baby Unicorn in their Stable (essentially a free starting Unicorn that contributes to the seven they must ultimately collect). For some reason, I’ve never quite warmed to the Baby Unicorns as it happens. The art appears a little too generic compared with the originality of some of the other portraits.
On their turn a player must resolve any effects that are applied to their Stable (if a card in play says so). Then they Draw a card from the central deck. Following this they can take only one of five actions: Play a Unicorn Card from their hand; Play a Magic Card from their hand; Play a Downgrade card from their hand; Play an Upgrade card from their hand; or, Draw an additional card.
The text on the card is then applied. This may cause a chain of effects. Another player may also commit what I call every time in the great spirit of dad jokes “unicornus interruptus” by playing a “Neigh” card as an instant effect to block their opponents turn. This is the principal “Take That” mechanic of the game. It resembles the “Nope” from Exploding Kittens and is guaranteed to always get a hilariously frustrated response from the targeted player. If they have one themselves, they could then play a “Neigh” to “Neigh” the first “Neigh” into a nightmarish Hall of Mirrors of excited braying and despair. It’s great.
Finally, players discard the number of cards necessary to ensure they only have a maximum of hand in their hand by the end of their turn.
That’s pretty much it.
Opinion
What really sets Unstable Unicorns apart and is the reason why it has been core in my game circulation for nearly ten years (and mandatory on long journeys with friends and family), is that the simplicity and joyful chaos of the game (which can go from thirty minutes to almost epically long periods of clinging to survival) is married to a great sense of humour. Indeed, the whole game is not only a brilliant experience in itself, but also a really fun satire on boardgame culture generally. If you were to step outside yourself to see Unstable Unicorns in play, it would closely resemble a TCG like Pokémon or Magic: The Gathering, but it punctures the occasional earnestness of some of those games by making all the monsters some messed-up species of Unicorn. It is hard to communicate precisely how much that amuses me. Unicorns (even among the relentless zoological parade of kawaii capybaras, llamas, wombats and mythical creatures that are the bread-and-butter of post-Exploding Kittens tongue-in-cheek boardgame art) are just crazy. What is so meaningful about a horned horse? What role do they play in the fantasy ecosystem? I digress.
Unstable Unicorns gently sends up the principal logic of tradeable card game collecting, which depends upon the idea (often a bit of an illusion) that one type of card is utterly unique and different from another. The creators at Unstable Games recognise that so much of the complexity of TCG games is just a veneer on what are often essentially a simple “Take That” game mechanic, and this game strips that back to reveal that underlying truth. They know their clientele perfectly and that if there is one thing board gamers know how to do it is laugh at themselves. Or, if they don’t, they should. Unstable Games are us, and they love us, but they also recognise irony when they see it. This is a great game to buy as a present for the gamer in your life. The “Basic Unicorns” – the grunts of the deck who have no special effects when brought into play – are hilariously designed to burlesque hackneyed tropes of modern hipsterism. One “Basic Unicorn” has a beard and is wearing a plaid shirt (the text reads “Beards are like so hot”). Another is all bright anime eyes and pigtails and the text is just a series of incomprehensible emojis. Yet another is clutching a pumpkin spiced latte in wonder and saying, “Pumpkin spice is the pumpkin spice of life”. Physician, heal thyself! If Exploding Kittens helped hipster game sub-culture into the mainstream, Unstable Unicorns comments wryly on that very mainstreaming. These horned horses are pretty deep, man. Oh, and I should mention the narwals. There are also narwals. I’ll stop trying to be clever about it, narwals are just great whichever way you look at it.
Since its initial launch there have been a number of expansions to the Base game. One for Kids, another with a clear NSFW content, Nightmares, “Rainbow Apocalypse”, Adventures, and “Unicorns of Legend”. The Unicorn Cinematic Universe expands unimpeded. Personally, while I think the art and jokes of the newer sets are absolutely superb and there is no drop in quality, I have to favour the original family friendly (8+) Base Game. The intergenerational experience that allows everyone to laugh together and at each other is at the core of the appeal of the game. Saddle up! But watch out for those horns. No-one really knows what they’re for.
