Unstoppable

John D. Clair's card crafting system is probably my most favorite game mechanic out there. I first encountered it playing Mystic Vale and was hooked ever since. I can say that Edge of Darkness was my first "big box" game that captivated me and it's because how it was what they had originally envisioned for Mystic Vale and the Card Crafting System. Because of this, I've had a fascination with transparent elements in board games, especially with cards. I backed Canvas because of its approach of layering with transparent cards, so quite often if a game has something with transparent pieces or components it'll draw my attention. So when the next "card crafting" game was revealed, this instantly shot up to my #1 anticipated game.

Here we come to Unstoppable, technically not a "Card Crafting System" game since that's reserved for AEG and it specifically calls out transparent overlaying cards, but John D. Clair still finds ways to do effectively the same thing within a smaller and limited scope. It's a solo to two player cooperative deckbuilding game that has similar DNA to Edge of Darkness in that the cards you're building are also the threats you're facing. Instead of transparent cards, the cards have cutout sides to allow for cards inside to fill the gap and provide additional effects.

Some assembly required

The rulebook goes over what to do for preparing the cards for play, the good thing being that you only have to do it once. You have to setup what cards go into sleeves because most cards typically make up one half of the front or back of a single playable card: The Core side and the Threat Side. While most of it made sense from the Assembly section, I did get a little confused regarding the Character cards initially. Yes, on the back of each of the Character cards it mentioned what Threat card should be paired with it, I just only read one and made an improper assumption. I fixed it thanks to the helpful video guide that they include a link to in the rulebook.

One thing that was a little odd at first is the fact that the Core cards jut out from the card sleeve ever so slightly. It's really weird to see cards not fit sleeves fully and there's a bit of "wrongness" to it initially, but it makes sense from a practical standpoint after playing the game. By having the front face have a bit of a lip out of the sleeve it makes it a lot easier to sleeve upgrade layers inbetween the Core and Threat layers, you can catch the upgrade on the lip and have it glide in place. This procedure because very natural to finesse as you do it often through play. Plus, when you're resetting cards its easier to pick the Core face and upgrades that need to be removed because of the extra lip, so its actually quite functional. After a while, the fact that its not "perfect" in the sleeve just goes away, and this is coming from someone who tends to sleeve almost every game they own.

Reading the rules for playing was also very smooth and straightforward. It helps that at its core its mostly normal deckbuilding conventions and very clear phases. There's a lot of underline usage for emphasis and importance but used where it counts. The player mats are double sided so you can choose how to orient your cards, they have a summary for the different phases and context for when and how to level up when the deck runs out.

Variety and choices abound

With Unstoppable, John D. Clair takes the fun of previous card crafting games and condenses it into this smaller form factor, and it works so well for it. The puzzle presented is getting enough actions to clear threats and making your cards more powerful for the future with the understanding that it also makes your threats stronger and harder to deal with as well. Each turn you start with 3 action points, which you need in order to pay for playing most cards. From turn to turn you keep the cards in your hand, but you don't draw new ones. Instead, to draw cards you have to defeat them as a threat in order to gain them to your hand.

To help, you also get a free new card every turn based on where your smaller level disk is at. There's 6 levels of cards, with each higher level containing stronger cards. This makes the leveling system really important. There's ways to temporarily boost it so that the next card you acquire is higher than your actual level, making it possible to get stronger abilities early on. And with permanent level ups that occur naturally you get a real sense of progression, especially as both threats and cards get stronger over time.

It's a nice departure from "traditional" deckbuilding, instead of just buying more and more cards with Unstoppab le it's a controlled growth of your deck. Since you get to pick from 3 it becomes a really tough decision thinking about what do you want both in hand now and for the rest of the game. Plus, the threat on the back side is randomized so you won't know what you're dealing with until it shows up as a threat – surprise! We saw this system from Edge of Darkness and it works exceptionally well here too, especially since with Edge of Darkness it was static: the upgrade side was paired with a specific threat section. By splitting the threats into its own separate layer and card, there's way more possibilities and it makes each game feel fresh.

You still get the feeling of acquiring more and more abilities through the upgrades. Each card can have two upgrades: a top half and a bottom half of the cutout side. Upgrades are permanent though, and they also tell you what consequence there is for the threat side, so there is thought in weight what you need, when you need it, and knowing what you'll contend with later. But importantly there's no restriction for how many upgrades you can get in a turn, just what you can buy. So now the layer of currency becomes a factor and sequencing things correctly so you can get the most out of your turn is the evolving puzzle from turn to turn.

Fending off Threats and beating Bosses

So the reason you're dealing with Threats are two fold:

1. If you take too much damage then game over happens instantly, so you have to mitigate as much as possible.
2. Typically dealing with Threats addresses dealing with the Boss mechanics.

The first two bosses, The Harbringer and The Triumvirate, work pretty similiarly: threat cards get added to your deck and defeating those adds progress to the Boss. Once you've defeated the boss, you win. The pressure to maximize what you do in your turn is due to the boss track, after every turn it progresses and if it reaches the end that is also a game over.

The Harbringer is pretty basic whereas the Triumvirate does something cool in that it has multiple locations that you can do damage to and once you fully defeat a location then it adds a rest-of-the-game ability. But the most interesting boss is Duomo's Menace, which is basically like a mini campaign and choose-your-own adventure with multiple endings.

What's really well done with this mechanic is how difficulty options are smoothly integrated here. The boss track acts as an increasing aggression counter that can affect threat cards and make them tougher to deal with. As well as certain bonuses such as dealing with stale upgrade cards that you want to refresh, because there are moments where it can certainly feel like you don't want anything offered from the Upgrade market. There's very thoughtful design in the boss track and the way it's structured.

Issues and nitpicks

While I can laud Unstoppable, I'm by no means calling it a "perfect" game. One issue I found was with shuffling the cards. Because of the cutout being on the side, it feels like trying to do a traditional bridge shuffle is a little difficult depending on how you hold the cards. This is especially notable with the Upgrade cards where shuffling them you tend to get clumps of the different halves together based on how the cards flex. Since these aren't sleeved, you can't effectively shuffle on the long side either because the cutouts will try to hook into each other. The best thing I found to help make a better shuffle for these is to pile shuffle with 4 piles, shuffling them individually and merging them with shuffles to get a more even distribution of shuffle.

When cards are on their Threat side, there's that sliver of a lip from the Core card that pops out of the sleeve and it has in very small text and icons what the card has for its base effect. However, because of how loose the sleeves are from natural play and from adding and removing cards between the two face layers, it's very easy for that info on the edge to get covered up. Not the end of the world, it takes just a small nudge to align the cards and push the smaller ones to reveal the edge, but it's also easy to miss and forget about.

Also, because of that upper lip, once again it's a double edged sword as it also does make it harder to shuffle in certain ways. Because your deck is sleeved and with how card thickness increases with upgrades over play, it's easier to just shuffle on the side length than attempting to bridge shuffle. However, because of varying thickness, depending on the boss that sideways shuffle tends clump the thinner single layer cards from say the Harbringer or Triumvirate threat decks into grouped clumps as well.

I recall shuffling around a bit, late into a game, and right after I flip the deck I noticed like 5 or so of the boss threat cards all at the top. As weird as it sounds physicality of this game can be a drawback in trying to create randomness where asked for. While, yes, it's completely possible and valid to have an arraingement of cards like this from a shuffle, just look at complaints of mana floods and mana screw from Magic: the Gathering, due to card varying thickness over the course of play I feel that lends to making it easier for it to occur.

Lastly, I'll complain that the player mats have the similar issue seen in other flat large-card formats. Since there's two tracks where you use cubes to track, its easy for it to get messed up if the player mat gets any force put upon it, the cubes just slide on the smooth surface. I would much prefer if there was even a premium option to have triple layered boards so that you keep the orientation options but now have added wells for the cubes to stay in the track and rails keep them more in place.

Positive Representation

On a better note, I was pleasantly surprised at the inclusion of a canonically queer couple. After my first play I took a small break and started to read through the Storybook. During unboxing, I had assumed it was meant for a campaign game but I flicked through it and realized it was really just lore. The story shares some background for the characters and the situations for how they some of them come to know each other. Without going into everything, the main thing that sparked my heart was that Kai Silver and Zephyr found themselves in a relationship together.

On a related note with lore, while not all of the art is unique, there's defiinitely some reuse, there are some notable examples of what appear to be small storytelling across related cards.

A combo-tastic success

In my view, Unstoppable is a testament to what a focused design can be for card crafting in a small box game. The essence of the card combos that you get from previous designs (Mystic Vale, Edge of Darkness, Custom Heroes, Dead Reckoning) is clearly captured. It doesn't seek to replace anything else in the line, rather it has its purpose and place in the family.

In some ways, I'm reminded of Legacy of Yu, another captivating small box game that you can get repeated plays and not feel like you've seen everything just yet. Resetting a play of Unstoppable and it's easy to realize that you only got a handful of new cards - even though it doesn't feel like it at all. Comparing that to the available decks of Core cards per level and it feels like that there's still more to discover.

Personally, I would like to see a follow up expansion to it:

• Additional bosses with more interesting and unique mechanics to them.
• Abilities that can deal with the market area or even previous level card decks.
  • I can imagine a Bargain X like ability where you pay to pseudo draft a core card from X level deck and use its effect one time before returning it to the bottom.
• Additional characters that could even have passive abilities or ways to activate, kind of like the Hero ability seen in Altered.
• Ways to manipulate upgrades on cards.

And similar to Warp's Edge from the same Solo Hero Series lineup, I wouldn't mind some optional upgrades such as premium tokens and that layered player mat I mentioned before. I will say, kudos for the extra sleeves and the existing playmats being double sided is very nice.

With how satisified I am with Unstoppable, it has me excited and hopeful for future card crafting ames, such as the upcoming Ruins.