Unmatched: the Recycling of Imagination
What Remains After a Fight in the Void
For those who read French, you can find the the original article here.
By now, Lewis Carroll, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells are probably turning in their graves.
Their iconic characters — Alice, Sherlock Holmes, and the Invisible Man — have been torn from their original worlds, cast into plastic miniatures, chopped into thirty-card decks, and thrown into an arena to fight to the death. Welcome to Unmatched.
One of the game’s great ideas has been to refresh its roster by drawing on literature (Dr. Jekyll, Dracula), popular culture (Robin Hood, King Arthur, Sinbad), and mythology (Medusa, Achilles).
In a mainstream imagination saturated by Marvel and Disney, such an approach has something genuinely intriguing — even seductive — about it. Although, it should be noted, Marvel has since managed to absorb the franchise itself by introducing no fewer than fifteen superheroes into the line-up.
Each character comes with a distinct playstyle, reinforcing the sensation of playing as them — or at least through the designers’ interpretation of these emblematic figures, which may sometimes overlap with the vague, archetypal image we ourselves carry of them.
This is the logic of the crossover, familiar from games such as Smash Up or Villainous. Their mechanics differ, but what they ultimately sell is the same thing: the permeability of fictional worlds.
Pandora’s box of the multiverse has been opened, and as long as the licensing rights can be secured, every hybridisation becomes possible.
Will we one day witness King Kong facing Bilbo Baggins? Tom Sawyer crossing swords with Gavroche? Harry Potter fighting Barbie? Vladimir Putin taking on Al Gore?
It is, in fact, rather surprising that Unmatched has yet to feature Frankenstein’s creature, since it could well serve as the perfect metaphor for these monstrous assemblages emerging from the entertainment industry’s factory of fantasies.
In reality, what is taking place is far more serious: it is the swan song of imagination itself.
Reluctant to take the risk of exploring new horizons, the great marketplace of culture has found its own interpretation of sustainability: infinite recycling.
In Unmatched, the traditional hero is uprooted from their native soil — their original narrative habitat, one might say — and placed in a jar of chloroform.
They are drained of their blood — that is to say, of their meaning. Their identity solidifies into a necrotic form that the entertainment industry waves before our nostalgic eyes. Its practitioners are necromancers, and day after day we attend spectacles that increasingly smell of death. Unmatched is merely the latest incarnation of this colonisation of the imagination by an army of the undead.
When one remembers that Unmatched itself emerged from the exhumation of Star Wars: Epic Duels (by the same designer) combined with elements from Tannhäuser, this comes as no surprise: hybridisation is part of its DNA.
A Long-Distance Chase
But what about the game itself?
If its theme confirms the standardisation of imagination eating away at a large part of the cultural landscape, do its mechanics at least manage to redeem Sherlock Holmes and company?
In Unmatched, the objective is simple: eliminate your opponents by reducing their health to zero. Players begin with five cards in hand and, on each turn, effectively receive two action points that may be used to:
- Draw a card and move (a combined action called Maneuver);
- Attack an opponent by challenging them with a card;
- Play a Scheme, activating a special ability.
All of this unfolds within a closed arena divided into interconnected zones.
At the heart of the system lies a deceptively simple interaction: both players select a card face down and reveal it simultaneously. The higher value usually prevails.
What follows is a flurry of effects and abilities designed to modify the outcome by manipulating the game’s various variables — attack and defence values, card draw, positioning, and so forth.
For all its Tarantino-esque flair, Unmatched is fundamentally a game of War, crossed with tactical positioning and seasoned with bluffing.
But it is a game of War punctuated by ellipses. Players do not always possess the cards required to resolve a confrontation on their own terms. They wait for the right moment, the right opportunity, the right card.
In the meantime, they wander.
Because Unmatched is a game about movement. Movement is vital precisely because it allows players both to replenish their hands and to access the game’s other actions.
Depending on our cards — or our lack thereof — we spend our time either closing in on our prey or fleeing to recover our strength.The strategic challenge then becomes cutting off the retreat of an opponent who has exhausted their hand.
The game could almost have been called The Hunt, so pervasive is the anxious sensation that there is nowhere left to escape.
The board itself, as though borrowed from an introductory course in graph theory, is ultimately nothing more than a labyrinth folded back upon itself. Entrance and exit become one and the same. Players take turns embodying each other’s Minotaur.
Mythological Torments
This sensation of having nowhere left to run resonates with a feeling of powerlessness that regularly haunts the game.
Sometimes, it is the helplessness of being unable to defend oneself when challenged by an opponent while holding no defence cards. The attack lands mercilessly, and every point of damage goes through.
At other times, it is the helplessness of a character trapped in their space, surrounded by enemy fighters or sidekicks and unable to escape.
There is, finally, the helplessness that comes from exhausting one’s options. Faced with an empty or inadequate hand, retreat becomes the only sensible course of action.
Condemned to this necessary wandering, heroes — and players alike — are repeatedly invited to experience themselves as prisoners of circumstance, victims of a fate that relentlessly pursues them.
Looked at closely, Unmatched may well belong to the genre of torments.
On one side stands Sisyphus and his legendary boulder. Unmatched players are perpetually caught in a cycle of accumulation and depletion: the ebb and flow of the very thing that makes action possible — their hand of cards. For an empty hand is synonymous with death.
One must then undertake a slow resurrection, painstakingly rebuilding one’s capacity for harm through successive Maneuvers, all in the hope of drawing the right card.
And this is where another punishment enters the stage: that of Tantalus, forever unable to reach the banquet laid before him.
Before us lies the object of desire: the perfect hand that will allow us to finish off our wounded opponent. Between ourselves and that royal flush stretch the infinite variations of the deck and all its disappointments.
Behind it all lurks one final torment: that of Prometheus.
Chained to the board itself — a network of interconnected paths — we are condemned to gnaw at our own livers until our strength gives out and another game begins anew.
The Meaning of the Brawl
For all its blockbuster status, Unmatched has the feel of a street fight. Forget the boxing ring and the dohyō. Think instead of the alleyway and the parking lot.
This is the kingdom of near misses, quick knife thrusts, and chaotic scuffles. And therein lies the game’s central contradiction: it summons venerable figures — positive counterparts to our own imperfections, imbued with an aura of admiration and desire — only to bring them crashing down into the gutter.
Not content with disregarding the meanings originally carried by the stories from which it borrows, Unmatched completes its bleaching of the imagination through the degradation of the very heroes it invokes.
Culture — understood here as a subversive space for reinventing both the world and ourselves — died one Monday evening at 10 p.m. in a Burbank parking lot.
It is hardly a revelation to observe that board games do not escape the commodification of culture. Unmatched, for all the pleasure it offers and the genuinely enjoyable duels it creates, follows in the footsteps of works devoted to capitalism with a very short memory.
The point is no longer to celebrate history and its legacy, nor to seek within them some illumination of our present condition. No. Cultural recycling operates through cloning. From a single drop of blood, we have recreated a dinosaur — astonishing and terrifying in equal measure, but ultimately and desperately unnecessary.
Beneath the polished surface, we are standing still.
And the formula works. New sets and expansions continue to appear: Bruce Lee, Buffy the Vampire Slayer…
We are told:
“Unmatched is more than a fighting game. It’s an invitation to cast yourself as the hero in an epic story, something Marvel has absolutely no shortage of.” (Interview of Jayme Boucher, Director of Games at Mondo)
This kind of marketing discourse nevertheless reveals a certain blindness — whether conscious or not — to the processes at work behind such productions.
As though merely invoking a hero were enough to immerse us in their world, their texture, their sensuality. In truth, there is nothing inside these straw figures.
Everything is beautiful, polished, precise, and immediately legible — the essential ingredients of commercial success. And herein lies the system’s deepest ambiguity: its ability to be both hollow and desirable at once. Because it must be said: for all its contradictions, Unmatched remains a good game.
All things considered, there may still be one legendary duel missing from the collection: Jean Baudrillard versus Steve Jobs.
But we already know who won.
Games Mentioned
- Unmatched — Rob Daviau, Justin D. Jacobson & Brian Neff (Restoration Games, 2019)
- Star Wars: Epic Duels — Rob Daviau & Craig Van Ness (Milton Bradley, 2002)
- Tannhäuser — William Grosselin & Didier Poli (Fantasy Flight Games, 2007)
- Smash Up — Paul Peterson (Alderac Entertainment Group, 2012)
- Disney Villainous — Prospero Hall (Ravensburger, 2018)
Novel Mentioned
- Frankenstein — Mary Shelley (1818)
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll (1865)
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle (1892)
- The Invisible Man — H. G. Wells (1897)
