Funkoverse vs Unmatched: Map and Mechanism Kombat

I think there's a certain appeal to fighting games, not...

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Well worth the wait. Having only played Unmatched, you've piqued my interest in Funkoverse... except I can not get past the Funko Pops. So I'll happily give this one a shot but on someone else's copy.

I agree with all of your points on Unmatched. I think, for me at least, the deck/hand management aspect wins the day. But of course, the caveat is, I've yet to play Funko.

Thanks for putting this article together^^

No problem. Glad you liked it. As I mentioned before, it's something that had been sitting in the back of my mind for a while, so it was good to finally get it done. It also got my friend, Brad, back into Unmatched when he'd drifted away from it a bit and exposed him for the first time to Funko, so upsides all around. Got a game of Houdini and the Genie planned for the near future, followed by a game of Leaders, probably on the Barracks map and definitely with Masked Manager...

Excellent article.

Thank you for the article was just discussing this with a couple people in my regular group recently.

Unmatched is all the craze in my small circle of friends and larger circle of "some times" friends. I do not enjoy it for many of the reasons mentioned. (Also I don't feel it remotely compares to Epic Duels.)

Been wanting to try Funkoverse for some time and now probably will, I see it's dirt cheap on amazon for many sets.

Smeagol wrote: Been wanting to try Funkoverse for some time and now probably will, I see it's dirt cheap on amazon for many sets.

Damnit. Why did you have to point this out

Great article! And impressive, as it now has me considering letting those bobble head monstrosities into my house.

Count me as another who’s a little turned off by the funko pops. My fighting game addiction is currently Summoner Wars, played 99.5% online. It’s more similar to Neuroshima Hex than either of these. But it has cards and dice. So it’s clearly the best.

I have no affinity for collectible Funkos, but I will say this: it’s nice having pre-painted minis. I can tell the characters apart immediately, and their big heads make them easy to handle. Unmatched has gorgeous art, but Funkoverse is so much more friendly on the table.

Jexik wrote: Count me as another who’s a little turned off by the funko pops. My fighting game addiction is currently Summoner Wars, played 99.5% online. It’s more similar to Neuroshima Hex than either of these. But it has cards and dice. So it’s clearly the best.

Summoner Wars is in the in-between space for me; somewhere between wargame and fighting game, like Neuroshima Hex. I wouldn't call NH a fighting game, but it's certainly arguable (much more so that Spirit Island, FFS.) But things with factions, like both Hex and Summoner Wars strikes me as a different thing. That said, I've been sorely tempted by the new Summoner Wars, but I really don't need to get into another even mildly-collectible thing.

This is great writing in about a dozen ways. Really impressive analysis.

That sometimes involves knowing how many Feints that character has in their particular deck, which is asking more of most casual players than they'd be willing or able to give.

There are six or eight patches of text I'd love to quote and analyze, but I'll leave it at this one. One of the things I found playing Unmatched, and in other games as well, is that I just don't want to spend the time to count other peoples' cards. I'm not so keen on counting my own. It's just not a part of gaming that brings me any positive emotional feedback. So games that depend on it, generally card-driven hand-management games, don't tend to light my world on fire. That's Unmatched's long suit.

Props to the Epic Duels mention, and I think your analysis of Unmatched's maps is spot-on, you're moving towards, or away. That's really the entire decision set from a graphical perspective, and Unmatched's very-limited movement antagonizes that. Epic Duels puts more distance into the mix, more openness, more ability to snooker somebody or figure out how to take a shot from long distance.

Did I mention this is really good writing?

Haven't stepped into a game of Funkoverse yet.

I'll mention this -- this is a very crowded field especially if you think broadly. You could put 20 games into an analysis cycle like this and that would just be the household names. I like compare and contrast articles, as they seem to really highlight strengths and weaknesses. We could use more like this.

Thanks! I really appreciate it. Uba mentioned this weekend that she enjoyed it because my writing always has so much poured into it. I told her that was from a lifetime of arguing on internet fora where I always wanted to be prepared to answer the challenges before they actually happened. But the enlivening thing about stuff like this is that there is no "right" answer. As a couple people have mentioned, they just can't get past the bighead figures. That's fine. It's all entertainment so you should be entertained by what you're doing. And there are upsides to Unmatched, including that counting cards thing for some people. I often enjoy that aspect to card games. But it's definitely more of a demand on individual players than other games would ask, so the audience will likely be smaller.

Great analysis. It makes me want to play the Funkoverse games. But at the same time I know I failed when I tried to introduce the Harry Potter set to the kids even though they are big fans, so probably won't succeed if I try again.

When we played the HP set I think the game had two issues for us. One we only used two characters and then a "blank" and couldn't really find strategies. And two, getting to know the abilities and especially how to use them was a steep learning curve. I think the lack of obvious strategy had a lot to do with only using two characters, but nonetheless synergies were hard to find and it seemed to end up in a slugfest more than anything else. From what I've read since then maybe building teams rather than having good HP characters vs evil HP characters is the way to go.

This learning curve is especially an issue in an open information game because you ideally want to know all the abilities before playing. So you sort of have to internalise them before playing, whereas in a card game getting hit by a card you didn't expect is more, well, expected. So for the first games Unmatched seems more casual because when starting to play them you can just go with what you have and try to manage your hand to the best of your ability. That being said I have only tried the Buffy one and not that much, and I can see that if you play it a lot you really want to count cards and who want to do that?

Thanks! And, yes, don't get me wrong: There's a learning process to Funkoverse, too, centered largely around exactly what you pointed out. You don't really know how to best exploit the abilities of the characters and so you end up standing around and bashing each other. The other challenge comes from one of the game's central conceits, which is how you arrange your team, token-wise. Is it a better idea to have a diversity of colors, so that you have a greater variety of things to do, albeit less frequently, or have a preponderance of a couple colors, so that you have more access but less diversity and can run the risk of running out of tokens for one of your two colors and be left just doing basic actions? I ran into that in my most recent game when I used up all my gray tokens and then couldn't really use Invisible Man as effectively as he could be.

Some of the sets suffer from that, in that you'll have a group of characters who don't necessarily work well together. Citing just the HP first box, Hermione takes some practice to use well and can seem underpowered compared to those around her (like, say, Bellatrix and Voldemort in that same box) and it's definitely a lesser experience to use the stand-in tokens for a full three-character team. That's what I meant about the irritating practice of selling 4s and 2s for a 6-character standard game. The upside of actually buying two boxes for a full six characters is that you will have four different boards to play on and, depending on which boxes you pick up, four to six different scenarios, too, which can keep you occupied for a while.

Tried this once or twice with Des and it didn't really click, but I'm looking at the prices on Amazon and thinking about picking some up to try it again. I can play Rick & Morty vs. Doc & Marty now, which is a fun possibility.