Unmatched: Battle of Legends, Vol. 3: An Epic Game 23 Years in the Making

Blackbeard draws his pistol and narrows his steely gaze at the Chupacabra, who hisses back with its gaping, fang-lined maw. Pandora taps her fingers mischievously on the ornate box, biding her time, and Loki just does that sly grin.  

[RECORD SCRATCH] You’re probably wondering how I got here – well, it’s a pretty wild tale.

The Game Is Afoot

To go back to the start, you have to set the wayback machine to 2002. Fans of The Wire learned that “Omar’s coming”, Avril Lavigne told us to “Let Go”, and a junior designer at Hasbro named Rob Daviau was excited to work on a new game based on the latest Star Wars flick. With veteran designer, Craig Van Ness, the plan was for a game that captured the exciting lightsaber duels from that storied franchise.  

Early on, they wanted the game to let you play as all the different characters from that world, with each character having a different set of cards. But there were two big hurdles. First, they weren’t sure if the higher-ups at Lucas would let them make a game where, say, Anakin could fight Darth Vader. Second, they didn’t know if it would be too costly to give each character their own custom deck. Fortunately, both of those were surmountable, and they were able to realize their full vision.  

Star Wars: Epic Duels proved popular, but the limited license meant that its time on the shelves was short-lived. Fans kept the game alive, creating their own decks and online implementations. But it would be 17 years until it officially got another turn.

I’ll Be Back

In 2016, I made Rob an offer he couldn’t refuse, and we started Restoration Games on the premise of bringing back out-of-print games and updating them for the modern hobby gamer. One of the first things we did was put a form on our website, where folks could suggest games for us to restore. The “big three” were Heroquest, Dark Tower, and Fireball Island. (Hey, two out of three isn’t bad!) Coming in right below that was a group of beloved games with dedicated followings that included Thunder Road, Omega Virus, and, of course, Epic Duels.  

In 2018, we started work on a restoration of Epic Duels and what that might look like. We knew we couldn’t get the Star Wars license. Heck, we’d never done any licensed game. So, we immediately turned our attention to public domain figures – heroes from literature and legend. We roughed out a roster of unlikely fighters. If we couldn’t have a tightly themed box, we figured we’d lean into the chaos. Originally, we scoped out a set with 6 heroes: King Arthur, Achilles, Yennenga, Sun Wukong, Louhi, and [REDACTED].  

(FUN FACT: There are over 16,000 fan decks on the unmatched.cards site, and the redacted fighter isn’t one of them. No one has ever guessed which fighter that was since the game’s release.) 

At Gen Con that year, we met with the game division over at Mondo and hatched a wild plan. We would co-publish the line, with Restoration releasing the public domain sets and Mondo releasing the licensed ones. We trimmed down and refined the roster, deciding that it would be nice to have a few more high-profile heroes in the initial offering: King Arthur, Medusa, Alice, and Sinbad. Having both teams working on the game let us get that initial release ready in time for the following year’s show. 

Released at Gen Con in 2019, Battle of Legends, Vol 1 was an instant hit. Lines wrapped around our booth (and Mondo’s) as folks clamored to pick it up along with Robin Hood vs. Bigfoot and the Bruce Lee solo pack. (If you haven’t heard the news: Bruce is coming back later this year in a two-pack with Muhammad Ali.) 

Unmatched rolled on, and the Battle of Legends format – four disparate heroes – continued on two years later with Vol. 2, featuring the return of Achilles, Sun Wukong, and Yennenga, along with Bloody Mary. It wasn’t long before we got to work on Vol. 3.

The Return of the King

The roster practically built itself. Back in 2020, we ran a deck design contest and received hundreds of great entries, so much so that we decided to award runner-up prizes in addition to the winners. When it came time to define the roster for Vol. 3, we pulled in three of those designs – Blackbeard, Chupacabra, and Loki – and added in Pandora to end up with another wild spread of figures. 

By this time, the success of Unmatched was undeniable, but we were also hearing some rumbling: The numbering was becoming a problem. Gamers new to the line were reluctant to buy Vol. 2 if they couldn’t get Vol. 1, thinking it was strictly a sequel. This was only going to get more pronounced as we continued the series, so we decided we’d make it a trilogy and make the third entry the last one. 

Not to worry, Unmatched isn’t going anywhere – we’ve got sets scoped out for the next few years. But Vol. 3 will see the end of the Battle of Legends boxes under that name. Ultimately, we think this is a great place for it to land. Our plan is to keep those three volumes in print indefinitely, even as we vault other, more recent sets. And, who knows, maybe we’ll do a special box set or anniversary edition down the road. 

Ultimately, what makes Unmatched so compelling is the fundamental promise at its core, first posed over 20 years ago: Anyone, anywhere. Nothing speaks to that idea more than the Battle of Legends.

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Justin D. Jacobson co-founded Restoration Games in 2016 with Rob Daviau, following a 20-year career as an attorney. He lives in South Florida with his wife, two daughters, fancypants cat Laurel, and himbo mutt Duke.