'Jurassic Park' Characters Coming To Mondo's 'Unmatched' Tabletop Game
A couple of years ago, Mondo – the company best known for selling stylish pop culture art – expanded out into creating board games, including one based on the John Carpenter film The Thing. The company has released a few other games since then, but perhaps none as interesting as Unmatched, which is a collaboration with Restoration Games. The tabletop/card game is a game system in which players move miniatures around on a board while using cards to attack and defend, and the game's title comes from its ridiculous match-ups of characters: Robin Hood vs. Bigfoot, for example.
Soon, some of the characters from Steven Spielberg's 1993 classic Jurassic Park will become playable characters in Unmatched – yes, including the film's raptors. Get the details about this new Jurassic Park Mondo collaboration below.
Interestingly, the previously-announced Jurassic Park: The Chaos Gene game has been scrapped entirely. (That may ultimately be good news, since we had some hesitation about what we'd seen from that game so far.) Instead, Mondo has a different Jurassic Park game in the works – or, more accurately, they've licensed Jurassic Park characters to fit into a previously-established game system.
A pair of two-player sets and a solo-hero pack are coming soon, kicking off with Unmatched: InGen vs. Raptors in late 2019, Sattler vs. T rex in 2020, and Dr. Alan Grant's solo expansion also dropping in 2020. Here's an excerpt from the press release:
As with all Unmatched sets, the power to mix and match heroes and maps to create a customized play experience is not only possible but encouraged...Each character deck has been engineered to represent the personality and characteristics of its on-screen counterpart, and no two heroes (or dinosaurs) battle the same way. Additionally, the unique maps featured on the game boards allow players to designate specific terrain to either replicate scenes from the film or direct their own.
If anyone is still a little confused about this style of gameplay, you're in luck: when /Film's Peter Sciretta visited the show floor during preview night of this year's San Diego Comic-Con, he caught up with Mondo's Jay Shaw, who explained the backstory, some of the mechanics, and the artists and designers who worked on it. I've queued up the video to the relevant section below:
"We teamed up with Mondo Games to bring exciting characters and settings to the battlefield in Unmatched, and they came through in epic fashion with Jurassic Park," explains Restoration Games President Justin D. Jacobson. "It is a thrill to get to work with one of the world's premier licenses. Bringing these truly unique fighters into Unmatched – from massive dinosaurs to brilliant scientists – really shows the system's strength, with each deck capturing their combat style. It only took 65 million years, but the Jurassic Park skirmish game you've been waiting for is finally here!"
According to Shaw, Unmatched: InGen vs. Raptors will first be for sale at Gen Con in Indianapolis in two weeks, and will be available wide shortly after that.