As always, the Restoration Games booth is a dangerous land of nostalgia, likely to drain your pocketbook if you’re not watching carefully. What I find interesting, is that I never played many of their “restored” games but I feel like I would have wanted to, giving me a sort of funny nostalgia of things I never played. Would that be ghost nostalgia or perhaps nostalgia deja-vu, the feeling that you’re nostalgic for something you’re just now playing? Regardless, the Restoration booth was firing on all cylinders showing off games heavy on “fun” and light on “serious.” The strategy level varies but many lean towards smashing things together (with rules of course) and seeing what happens. On the light end of the spectrum was the new stand alone release, Thunder Road Ignition, with slightly lighterweight rules than the base Thunder Road game. More Unmatched titles were on hand, with Unmatched: Stars and Stripes selling out and other releases being announced. The display with the most presence (possibly of the show) was the upcoming The Lord of the Rings: The Kings Gambit.

Thunder Road Ignition (by Noah Cohen, Rob Daviau, Justin D. Jacobson, and Justin Kemppainen)

Thunder Road Ignition is a new, standalone addition to the Thunder Road family. It is sort of a mass market version of the game (MSRP $35) with slightly simplified rules from the recent release. It’s the same smash-em/shoot-em up car race of death but with no elimination.

Players have a simplified board to control their cars. In addition to placing a die on each car, players can use any die to trigger the four bonus moves – slipstream, wrench (heal a car), drift (like before), and missile. The missile is sort of like the (now removed) helicopter but there’s nothing to place. You just roll the attack die.

The track comes in curves and is all laid out at the start of play (rather than continuously building it.) Players race from one end of the course to the other with the winner the first to get two cars across the finish line. Of course, all the new (now curved!) track tiles and bits can be used in the original game. It was out at Gen Con but look for it in stores later this fall.

Unmatched (base game designed by Rob Daviau & Justin D. Jacobson, expansions by a horde of others as well)

Unmatched remains one of the most popular lines of Restoration Games and, unsurprisingly, they continue to put out new releases. The gist of the game revolves around fighters (1v1 or 2v2) moving around a board, trying to take out the opponent. Combat is in the form of playing cards (adjacent enemies of melee, any enemy on the same colored square if at range.) The difference in card values is the damage taken. Every character (and there are a LOT) plays a bit differently, usually with some sort of special character ability and with their own specialized deck of cards. You don’t automatically draw cards, but you do get one card every time you move – but then you’re not attacking. Characters that draw lots of cards have to be careful because you die if you run out of cards in your deck. Many characters have a companion token that also moves and fights. Some cards are only usable by the main character or the companion. It is an elegant system of streamlined combat that allows plenty of space to explore new abilities and combos.

The newest released expansion is Stars and Stripes that includes Rosie the Riveter, George Washington (in spymaster mode), Wyatt Earp, and John Henry. The first three were actually designs submitted by fans that won a contest. If you want lots of details on the set, read Mark Jackson’s deep dive on this site.

Upcoming releases include a more beginner-friendly set called Once Upon a Time featuring the Big Bad Wolf, Mulan, Snow White, and Pinocchio. Announced at the show is an upcoming set based on the videogame Slay the Spire. Look for heroes based around The Ironclad, The Silent, The Watcher, and The Defect. Finally, there will be a new Unmatched Adventures (a co-op version that can be mixed and matched with any character) Unmatched Adventures: A Study in Terror. Like the other adventure sets, it will have four new heroes and two new big boss villains to face.

A quick game of Bigfoot vs Sherlock Homes

For those willing to go digital with their boardgames, Dire Wolf is putting out a brand new digital implementation of Unmatched. This is sorely needed as the current, fairly old, digital game is almost unplayable. I got a chance to play with the current build of the game and it was pretty nice.

I am the boss! – of the almost nonexistant game AI at the moment… I’m still marking it down as a win…

At the moment, however, the AI is pretty stupid, but there’s still plenty of time to fix that. Also, anyone who bought the previous digital game will get the same content unlocked in the new version for free. Way to do right by the early adopters!

The Lord of the Rings: The King’s Gambit (by Thomas Cauët, Noah Cohen, Rob Daviau, Justin D. Jacobson, Justin Kemppainen, Alan Roach, and Craig Van Ness)

One of the more sought-after “grail games” is Star Wars: The Queen’s Gambit. It’s a smash ‘em up wargame fought over several different areas all at the same time. A big part of its table presence was the very cool multi-level palace holding the Queen, while the Trade Federation, et al… climb up to take control. As with any strong IP, it is extremely doubtful it will ever come back into print. However, Restoration Games is back with an attempt to remake it in a new image, this time with a Lord of the Rings theme.

Mordor, Port of Pelargir, Pelennor Fields, and Minas Tirith in the foreground. You can’t see it from this angle but Minas Tirith goes up in levels at least as much as Mordor does…

Like the Queen’s Gambit, the King’s Gambit has four simultaneous playing fields: the towers of Minas Tirith (foreground), the battle in Pelennor Fields (green/black area), the port at Pelargir (small rectangle area), and the ringbearer’s crew crawling through Mordor to get to Mount Doom (the fairly obvious big black mountain.) Each area brings its own victory or loss condition. If the Shadow forces get to the top of Minas Tirith, they win. If the Riders of Rohan are able to destroy the siege equipment in far side of the Pelennor Fields, they win. (Fun fact, the shadow player has a very powerful Witch King piece on the Fields but four (5?) of the Rohan riders are specially marked. ONE of those is secretly Éowyn, and does huge damage to the Witch King if she gets in an attack…) The port of Pelargir (the game is based on the books, not the movie, if you don’t recognize the area) has Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas taking on an entire horde of Haradrim. Yes, the three of them are pretty tough dudes. Whichever side “wins” the Port of Pelargir gets to bring their surviving troops into the rest of the board. (That would be Minas Tirith if the bad guys win, Pelennor Fields if the heroes win.) That is not a good sign for the losing side, unless they are already pretty close to victory elsewhere.

Mordor and the Port. All those bad guys vs the three grey heroes… :)

Finally, you have Frodo, Sam, and Gollum/Smeagol journeying up Mount Doom. Throw the ring in to win, get caught to lose. This area is a bit of a game timer through cubes drawn from a bag. Playing cards and performing well on the battlefields will add cubes or otherwise mess with the bag contents. Smeagol is kind of interesting as players can flip him over to Gollum and back, getting him to lean a bit towards one side or the other, giving different effects to the bag depending on his active persona.

OK, so how does the game work? Players draw cards and then play them to activate various things on the field. It reminded me a bit of Memoir ‘44. There are actually two decks of cards, affecting armies in one field of play or another. You draw two cards from each deck, so you can’t just specialize in one area or another, at least not for very long. Players pre-plan what cards they will use in a round, but each card actually has two sides, somewhat similar to Gloomhaven, so although a player chooses their cards early they then have a couple options when it comes time to resolve them.

All (most?) cards have a “boost” slot. Players start with two 1x boosts, and two 2x boosts. These are used when playing a card to activate the card abilities. Unsurprisingly, the 2x boost will usually make the card twice as good (ie, get 4 troops instead of 2.) There are even 3x boosts to be upgraded to if you manage to do well. In the photo, there is a yellow arrow token, I believe this is a “momentum” token which also can be earned through successful gameplay.

Similar to some other Restoration Games, they have put their own spin on the game by introducing objectives to the game. At the start of the game 5 objective cards are laid out. Players who complete the object gain the benefit listed, which could include an improvement to their “boost” cards (I think.) In this way, every game will play out differently because there will be different objectives on the table.

The game plays 1 to 4 players, so there’s a solo mode (of which I know nothing about) and a 2v2 teams version. The 4 player game is slightly different than the 2 player game in that each player has their own hand (not one big one) and still has to manage the various areas all at once. There are, of course, numerous Easter eggs to be found in the game. Callbacks to the Lord of the Rings in general, but also to the old Queen’s Gambit game.

Various dice for resolution.

So what will this cost? Well, the game comes in two sizes: large and huge. (Just like McDonald’s there is no “small”…) No, really, it’s actually “Deluxe”, coming in at $199 on the Kickstarter, and “Mithril” coming in at $379. I believe the display at the booth was only the “Deluxe” version. Both games will come in two boxes each just to hold everything. I was told that, eventually, Space Cowboys/Asmodee will eventually be doing a retail run and localized versions of the game. This will be a smaller price point (that “medium” level perhaps?) but still contain the entire game, just with different components. The Kickstarter should launch in mid-September with a hopeful release around October of 2027.

Other news:

While I did not see anything specifically in my booth visit, there are several upcoming games still in development, hopefully to release soon-ish. Return to Dark Tower: Expeditions expansion is in pre-production, Battle Monsters: Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah still has its miniatures being worked on, and Thunder Road: Vendetta – Interstate of Decay, a campaign version of the game is still being worked on. Restoration Games turns ten in 2027 and plans to release tenth anniversary editions of two of its earliest titles: Downforce and Stop Thief! (Yes, that’s the 10th anniversary of the re-tooling of the older games… so the original games are several decades old…