Unmatched: Marvel Hell's Kitchen

^{review by Alapai}

Unmatched: Marvel Hell’s Kitchen is a Marvel Comics themed Unmatched set from Restoration Games. In Hell’s Kitchen, you play as one of either Daredevil, Elektra or Bullseye in a battle against one of the others. Unmatched is a remake of a long out-of-print game, as all of Restoration Games’ games are. Unmatched is a remake of Star Wars Epic Duels, remade to feature lots of different characters, most of which are public domain, but some of which are from different media franchises like Marvel or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But you can also read about Unmatched in general from my colleague’s review here. This review is more about the minis in the game and what you can do with them.

The first thing I want to mention about the minis is that Unmatched is a board game and not a hobby-based game. That means the minis come fully assembled and colored in grayscale, as if you just took Ratling Grime and colored the whole model. There is some depth to them, but they are all in grey and dark grey in the crevices. If you want to play Unmatched without painting the figures, that is completely fine and the way Restoration Games expects most people to play. But, if you want the figures to be in color, you can paint them and that is what I have done.

I own all of the Marvel Unmatched sets and I often try painting my Unmatched figures in less common outfits. For example, I painted Deadpool in his Uncanny X-Force outfit and Spider-Man in his “Threats and Menaces” outfit. With the Hell’s Kitchen minis, I decided on changing up two of the figures, Daredevil and Elektra, to outfits other than the default given by the box and went with a traditional Bullseye, albeit in black instead of dark blue.

As these minis are designed to be played out of the box and aren’t designed so that you have to take a real close look at them, there are some imperfections on them. I found that my minis had a noticeable bump on them where they were cut from their sprue. So if you do want them to be perfect for painting, you probably want to examine them first and remove any imperfections before priming them.

While all 3 characters in Hell’s Kitchen have simple designs with a limited color palette (Daredevil and Elektra each have costumes only in red with Bullseye in black/dark blue with a tinge in white), only Bullseye ended up being as simple to paint for me. Generally, he was pretty easy to paint, with the bullseye on his head and eyes being the most difficult parts. The bullseye itself was too small for me to paint each circle, so I had to settle for one middle dot of black with an outer circle of white. Otherwise, the model itself had raised parts to distinguish where the colors went so it was mostly just painting in the lines.

I painted Daredevil as he appeared in his first appearance in Daredevil #1. The biggest issue with painting characters differently from the outfit the game has in mind is that the outfit isn’t divided along the lines you need. Fortunately for me, his red and yellow outfit isn’t majorly different design-wise from his classic red outfit. The main differences are that for red and yellow outfit, he has a fully yellow outfit with a red wrestling singlet over it as opposed to a fully red outfit. So to paint him like his first appearance, I first painted in white where all the yellow would be, then in dark red where the red was, before finally painting yellow over the white. While slightly trickier because of adding my own lines, he was still fairly easy to paint.

Elektra was the most challenging. I wanted to paint her as her current incarnation as Daredevil which is a very different look from her classic look. Fortunately, while the look is pretty different, her Daredevil outfit at least still has some of the flowing parts of her classic look and if you paint what would be her skin to be black fabric and paint over the top part of her face, you can emulate the mask. With a little extra work painting her sides black and adding a double-D logo on her chest, I was able to at least make her somewhat resemble her Daredevil outfit.

Painting Unmatched figures was mostly easy. While most of the poses generally aren’t all that dynamic (Black Widow and Spider-Man are both more so), most of them also aren’t very static (Luke Cage being probably the most boring), so most end up being at least somewhat interesting. As they are out of the box in a single piece, they also are actually pretty easy to paint as there’s not a lot of body parts in the way so a paint brush can get to all of the model fairly easily. I did find that, while my primer did go onto the minis, you might want to clean them gently with a little soap before priming them as you would with resin minis. They have a wash on them to make them less boring right out of the box and cleaning the wash off should make the primer stick better.

If you are looking to paint some minis, but don’t want to assemble them first, Unmatched has some pretty decent minis with a variety of options. Price-wise, I would say that you probably don’t want to purchase Unmatched just to paint the minis, but as it is also a fun game, it works for both.

Unmatched games are available now from our webstore.