I bought this the day it released purely on the strength of the base Unmatched system, and it took two plays for me to realize the thing I actually love about Unmatched, the card based bluffing duel between two equally matched decks, is exactly what this co-op version removes. You’re fighting an AI opponent running fixed decks instead of a human across the table reading your hand, and because the AI never runs out of cards and rarely bluffs the way a person does, combat resolves closer to a coin flip repeated until someone’s hit points run out, glorified war, not the cat and mouse game the base system is built on.

The pulpy cryptid theme is genuinely charming, and the terrain-driven scenarios do add some real variety scenario to scenario, that part of the design is intact. But the initiative system turned into a real frustration for us specifically, certain enemies can act multiple times before you get a turn back if the draw goes against you, and against an enemy with high mobility there’s functionally no way to disengage once it’s decided to focus you down, which reads less like tension and more like the dice, or the deck acting as dice, deciding the session for you.

At two players, which is how we always play this one, there’s also just less going on than the base game offers, since you’re both nominally on the same side fighting the scenario rather than each other, and it turns out the thing I wanted out of Unmatched specifically was the against each other part. Setup and teardown are fine, quick even, but I’ve found myself reaching for the original dueling boxes instead almost every time this one’s been an option.

Three stars. A fine co-op in isolation, but if you came to Unmatched for the duel like I did, this spinoff mostly reminds you what you’re missing.