I’ll admit some bias walking in, Unmatched has been a favorite of mine for a while now, but almost all my prior plays were 1v1 or 2v2, and I was genuinely unsure a card-tactics skirmish system could survive being retooled into a cooperative boss fight against an AI-controlled villain. It survives it. Two villains and a small army of minions ship in the box, with enough dials, minion counts, health totals, the optional Amazing Events cards, that a table can tune difficulty without needing a house rule.

The characters are where this always wins me over, and this set is no exception, a giant ape, a mothman-adjacent cryptid, a pulp-adventure cast that plays as distinctly from each other as the fighters in the head-to-head sets always have, each with their own small deck of tricks that reward learning them specifically rather than generically. The rulebook and the player aids carry a lot of the teaching weight, and a new group can be swinging cards within one short explanation, which given how many moving pieces a four-player co-op boss fight could have in theory is a real design achievement.

The one criticism I’ve seen elsewhere, that the villain AI can feel a little too generous or a little too punishing depending on the matchup, tracked with my own table’s experience once or twice, a fight that should have been close ran away from us in one direction before we’d really settled in. Doesn’t happen often enough to be a real dent. Five stars, this is exactly how you do a cooperative expansion for an existing system, deepen it instead of just reskinning the same fight.