SNAP Review – Unmatched: Marvel Teen Spirit

We love Unmatched. But one thing we hadn’t done yet was dig into those branded Marvel sets. So that’s the question we’re going to ask this week. How does Unmatched hold up with super heroes?

Game

This is a SNAP review for Unmatched: Teen Spirit, a dueling game for 2-3 players from the usual suspects at Restoration Games. This set features three Marvel superheroes: Squirrel Girl, the team of Cloak & Dagger, and Ms Marvel. The box says it’s best for ages 14+ and plays in 20-40 minutes.

Art

Let’s talk about the art here. Heather Vaughan and the rest of the team have really outdone themselves. The illustrations look like they were taken directly from the characters’ comic books.

I mean, look at this! Even the empty spaces on the punch board have this comic book art!

The figurines and graphic design are exactly what we’ve come to expect from Unmatched.

Even more, the characters are strongly color-coded – everywhere, so you can tell them apart at a glance: not just the card backs and the rings on the figures, but even the backgrounds of each card image! Bright green for Squirrel Girl, yellow for Ms. Marvel, and dark blue for the team of Cloak & Dagger.

Mechanics

So let’s talk mechanics. Anitra, let’s do a quick reminder on how to play Unmatched, in general. The goal of the game is to take out the opposing player’s hero by attacking them until their health drops to zero. (That rhymes!)

On your turn, you normally get two actions. With each action, you may either maneuver, which is drawing a card and then moving any or all of your figures, or you can play a card. If the card you play is a Scheme, its effect is carried out immediately. If it is an Attack, your opponent has a chance to play a Defense card. Then resolve any immediate effects, during-combat effects, or after-combat effects on both the attack and defense cards.

In addition to their unique deck of cards, every character also has a special ability that changes some aspect of how they approach the game. Ms. Marvel can stretch to attack opponents two spaces away, Cloak & Dagger get bonuses after dealing damage, and Squirrel Girl… summons squirrels, of course.

It’s great! Squirrels are a “small fighter” sidekick so they can share spaces with each other, with Squirrel Girl, or with her opponents.

The board also has a feature we haven’t seen before: battlefield items. These are randomly placed in the designated spots on the board, and when your character is on that space, they may use the token. Scheme items may be used as if you were playing a scheme card. Combat items can be used to augment a combat card (either attack or defense). Either way, discard that item after using it.

Either two or three players can fight in a free-for-all here, and of course you can mix and match it with any other Unmatched set, creating two player team ups or four player brawls!

Expectations

So what did we expect from Unmatched: Teen Spirit?

[Anitra] Well, I really love Ms. Marvel. I also love Unmatched, and it’s one of my favorite games to play with my kids. So I jumped at the chance to try this set. Squirrel Girl also seemed entertaining, and I didn’t know anything about Cloak & Dagger at all.

[Andrew] About Cloak & Dagger, I actually really like their two character approach, I thought it was the strongest thing about the Buffy set, which we didn’t super love, and I really love playing as Achilles and Patroclus in Battle of Legends Volume 2. So I was hopeful that although I didn’t know a lot about Cloak and Dagger as characters, just like you, I’d enjoy playing with them. And I did.

Surprises

There are also some surprises.

[Andrew] Every character in this set is different, which isn’t really a surprise, but I really liked the different approaches to comic book style melee fighters. Squirrel Girl’s army of tiny little squirrels can be helpful, but you have to spread them out across the board to keep an opponent from knocking out too many at once.

[Anitra] Cloak & Dagger are a very interesting pair of equally matched heroes – but like any multi-hero set, they really depend on each other. Once one of them is gone, the other one’s going to struggle to stay in the fight.

[Andrew] This is true, but I do want to say Cloak and Dagger were really well balanced. I felt they were even more tightly coupled than any other characters in other sets, like the ones I mentioned before. It worked really well! They can even balance each other’s hit points between them with certain cards, which I thought was really neat.

[Anitra] That was really cool.

[Anitra] I loved the irreverent quotes on Squirrel Girl’s cards. It really adds to the comic-book feel for me, with things like: “See? Math comes in useful even in battle.”

[Andrew] The special battlefield items seem like a cool idea, but they just weren’t that interesting. We used them sometimes, but it wasn’t worth going out of our way to take advantage of them and land on those spots. And they don’t give any kind of ongoing benefit, like high ground or secret passages which we find in other sets).

[Anitra] There’s a lot of attitude in this set that we like. Kind of like teenagers, I guess.

Recommended?

[Anitra] So Andrew, do we recommend this Unmatched: Marvel Teen Spirit?

[Andrew] The Marvel characters do come with a little bit of a price tag. You’re getting three characters for a little bit more than you would probably pay for four in a different set. It’s worth it if you really love them [Anitra: I really love Ms Marvel!], but otherwise, you can stick with the less expensive sets.

So Anitra, what are we going to rate Unmatched: Teen Spirit from Restoration?

[Anitra] We’re going to rate it 3½ comic book heroes out of 5.

And that’s Unmatched: Teen Spirit, in a SNAP!

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Unmatched: Marvel Teen Spirit from Restoration Games for this review.

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SNAP review music is Avalanche, provided courtesy of You Bred Raptors?