If you are reading this, you probably already know what Unmatched is. If you do not know what Unmatched is, then what are waiting for, go and check it out!! It’s a great game of miniatures and card play where you can answer the undying question will Bigfoot beat Sherlock Holmes in a fight, or will King Arthur hold his own against Dracula. Honestly its bonkers! Add in some awesome IPs like Marvel, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Jurassic park, and the madness goes further. Great fun.
The only issue with Unmatched is that it can become somewhat addictive as new sets are announced and released. Before you know it you have shelves of boxes, each holding only a handful of miniatures, associated tokens and decks of cards.
Enter the official Unmatched storage system; the Battle Box with Boost Cubes.
What is a battle box and boost cube?
A battle box is at its core, a box. Honestly, nothing too fancy here (unless you think of the gorgeous cover art on one of the new boxes). They are designed to hold 12 boost cubes in total, and also have a tray put some rule books and boards on.
The quality of the box is really good, it feels sturdy, and even when full, you never fear it will give way under pressure. The box originally launched with two designs, a simple black box with a design the evokes the iconic unmatched card types of versatile, attack, defend and scheme. The second was a mosaic, almost psychedelic design.
2026 sees a third design enter the arena alongside a reprint of the original black design. The new design is almost comic strip in style, styling art from across the range of characters found in the series of games, all fashion on a clean white box. This is by far the most attractive of the boxes, and its great seeing the box art pop with card and character art.
Inside the box, you will find your tray for the boards and manuals. This is a simple thing tray with inlay, but also adds a spacer function from the cubes to the box lid. Much like the first run of boxes, the new box run also suffers from the tray being perhaps a little thinner than you’d like. Once filling the box of characters, the tray couldn’t hold all the associated boards with the sets, and definitely struggled to hold the rules manual as well. It’s a minor issue, but feels an oversight for a system designed to help with storage.
The cubes are solid plastic, made of a base and a clear lid, complete with adjustable separators inside to customise your boost cube set up. The quality feels great and good to last and are now available in both black and white.
The boost cubes are not (when you first look at them) much to look at, but it is when you fill them, the suddenly you are treated to both a storage solution and a possible display solution.
This is because you fill the cube in any way you wish, so you can have the miniature on display, or the back of card art in the most prominent position, or why not have the miniature, with the awesome card art featuring as a backdrop behind? This could leave collectors a nice way to display they characters.
Functionally though, these cubes allow you to combine all the miniatures, cards and components into a tidy storage, making them easy to grab and go ready to play.
The old system suffered a little bit though as the miniatures ended up rattling around inside the cube.
Enter the Hero Stands!
The hero stands are the latest edition to Restoration games official storage solution. They simple hold the fighter miniatures in place, and provide a space for some character tokens underneath. You can nor happily store your miniatures upside down, if that is your bag.
The trade off here, is that the hero stands leave you having more limited options for set up as they take around a third of the box space up. The cubes have always been a bit of a challenge to fit two characters per cube, and now it makes that a little more difficult, not impossible though.
With the exception of some characters, careful choice of partnering up and cube layout, means you can mostly squeeze two in each cube, its tight, but it can work.
Final thoughts
If you are a collector, and you don’t mind disposing of the original boxes and using an alternative means to store your collection, this is no brainer. With just two boxes, we have already reduced two full shelves of boxes, down to one shelf to hold the entire collection. It’s a big space saver.
The downsides have mostly been covered bar one…
Once you have a full box, they can become quite weighty, so be sure to use your all-important manual handling and lifting training to avoid harming yourself. Seriously, it is quite surprising how much the boxes weigh post filling.
We have two boxes, and have third on preorder to finish getting the last few miniatures into a more space conscious storage solution. The only sets we won’t use them for is the adventures games, no reason just a personal choice, but there is no reason why you couldn’t. The third box will also provide a good excuse to buy some more, so Zatu’s stock controller beware, we’re coming!
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.
