I think it’s fair to describe John D. Clair as king of the card-crafting deckbuilder. Admittedly, no one else is vying for that throne, but it’s hard to deny the man’s prolificacy in the arena of “putting cards in sleeves with order cards to create different cards.” From the light, whimsical forests of Mystic Vale to the swashbuckling shores of Dead Reckoning, Mr. Clair has carved out a pretty bountiful niche for himself, and I’m surprised the idea hasn’t become more popular.
The latest of these designs is Unstoppable, a cooperative boss battler themed around traveling the galaxy and beating the daylights out of people to earn fame and glory. It’s got style, weird-shaped cards, and a metric ton of plastic, but is it any good?
Unstoppable is a 1-2 player cooperative deckbuilding game. It plays best with 1 player, and takes 45-60 minutes to play.
Gameplay Overview:
In Unstoppable, you play some variety of do-gooder, hoping to build up your skills and allies to take out threats and eventually defeat the Boss of the scenario. For the bulk of each turn, you will be facing three or more active threats, which attack you at the end of the turn if you cannot defeat them using the cards in your hand. These threats also represent the only reliable way to draw new cards.
You start with just three in hand, but whenever you defeat a threat, you immediately add it to your hand, where you get to play the card for its ability on the flip side. There are two types of cards: tactics are played for one-off effects, whereas allies are semi-permanent cards that stay in play from turn to turn. Your deck starts with a glut of basic tactics and a few character-specific cards, but at the start of every turn, you get to draft a new card from a modest deck of randomized abilities. The card you choose is combined with a random threat and added immediately to your hand. You can also spend credits to purchase upgrades, which slot into your cards and make them (and the threat on the flip side) more powerful.
At the end of each turn, you suffer damage from each threat still in play, then refill your threat area from the top of your deck. When you reach the end of the deck, you get to level up, which grants you access to more powerful cards to draft from, but also wipes out all your allies and makes the threats you face much more dangerous. Leveling up is also (generally) how you defeat the Boss, with specific events triggering when you level up that deal damage to the Boss directly. If you manage to defeat the Boss before you run out of health (or you reach the end of the turn track), you win the game.
Game Experience:
Despite its name (and its obnoxious insistence on the term “momentum deck-builder”), Unstoppable is not really about going as fast as possible. In fact, almost every element of this game is trickier and more nuanced than it first appears. It can be frustrating at first, but if you get past the initial hurdles, I think Unstoppable is something special.
The dual nature of your deck forces you to reconsider a lot of things. You want to defeat enemies to draw cards, but going too hard leaves you defenseless on the next turn. You want to go through your deck to level up, but the turn after you level up is also when you’re the most vulnerable. Upgrading a card is great, but if it makes the threat on the reverse a lot tougher, you’ll have spent precious credits to accomplish nothing. Everything you do moves you forward, but it also sets you back, and you have to thread that needle to make actual progress.
That might sound frustrating—and when I first read the rules, I thought it would be infuriating—but Unstoppable pulls it off by making everything feel good. The cards you draft are uniquely game-altering, every upgrade is tantalizing, and leveling up is always satisfying, even when it kills you. Losing doesn’t feel like failure; it feels like success came just a little too slowly, which is a pretty impressive tightrope to walk.
Unstoppable’s only serious failure (aside from its tacked-on two-player mode) is its Boss design. Of the three that come in the box, two are near-identical, mechanically uninvolved races to level up as fast as possible. The third scenario is much more interesting, with branching narrative choices and added timing considerations, but it suffers from other odd choices that bring it down. The core deck-building loop has enough replay value to mitigate the impact of this issue, but it’s still a black mark on an otherwise stellar design.
Final Thoughts:
Unstoppable is a much weirder and more idiosyncratic game than it first appears. If you’re expecting a more “standard” deckbuilding game, you’ll likely be frustrated by its demanding approach to timing, tactics, and momentum, but if you enjoy interacting with novel systems and ideas, there is a ton to explore here. Even if the scenarios aren’t particularly interesting, the myriad combinations of cards, enemies, and upgrades make every game play out differently. I’ve played some great deck builders over the past few years, but Unstoppable is one of the coolest.
Final Score: 4.5 Stars – Middling scenario design can’t drag down an otherwise phenomenal solo deckbuilder.
Hits:
• Innovative and idiosyncratic, without feeling gimmicky
• Interesting tactical decisions, both in card play and deckbuilding
• Everything feels satisfying
• Card are all fun, interesting, and different
Misses:
• Scenario design is pretty bad
• 2-player mode feels like an afterthought
• Could use a few more cards in each deck
• Gameplay can feel demanding and frustrating at first
Disclosure: Someone who works with Renegade Games also writes for Board Game Grow. He had no influence over the opinions expressed in this review.
