Game Review: Unstable Unicorns (NSFW)

NOTE: This review features game elements deemed 21+ and NSFW (Not Safe For Work). Reader beware.

While I was at Toy Fair, I met with the team from Teeturtle, who last year launched a Kickstarter campaign for a new card game called Unstable Unicorns. This campaign was fully funded within the first two hours of it’s start. All told, almost 34,000 backers raised over $1.8 million dollars. This made them able to create expansion packs, special rewards, brand building items like t-shirts and plush, and more. Towards the end of 2017, the game started to be released to the Kickstarter backers, and is now being sold to unsuspecting consumers who will fall in love with these cute (and sometimes slightly irreverent) unicorns.

After loads of laughs and jokes learning about the game at the Teeturtle booth, I was sent home with the base game as well as the Uncut Unicorns (NSFW) pack to review. Earlier this weekend, my brother Stephen, my cousin Rick, and I gathered to build our own army of unicorns.

The base game of Unstable Unicorns is age rated 14+. From what I saw, a few of cards in this set are a little more mature than others. Mainly, however, the game sets to humorize the fandom surrounding unicorns and “basicness”… I am sure all of us have people like this in our life or social media circles.

The object of the game is to build your stable (army) of unicorns the fastest. Throughout this endeavor, cards can be played by yourself (or others) to help, hinder, or otherwise destroy your plans. The deck of cards is made up of a variety of different options you can pull.

Note: In this promotional image from the game’s Kickstarter, it states that there are 132 cards in the base game. There are actually 135…. bonus!

Gameplay is pretty basic, and if you are well versed in card gaming it should not be hard to pick up.

We played the first round just using the base game, making sure we got the mechanics down… and it quickly became a very fun game just like w88 for pc. We took joy killing off one another’s unicorns, or finding ways to prevent others from winning. My cousin Rick almost won, but a barrage of Neigh cards prevented his Ginormous Unicorn from coming out.

My brother won the game in the next round (all of the Neigh cards were used to keep Rick from winning) and Stephen was very proud of his unicorn stable.

Once we got the first game under our belts (probably lasted about 1/2 hour), it was time to break out the Uncut Unicorns deck… otherwise known as the NSFW (Not Safe For Work) deck.

Note: This is the Kickstarter packaging of this deck. The retail version is expressly labeled NSFW.

There is NOTHING safe about these cards (the deck is age rated 21+), and immediately we knew that there would be a lot of sexual humor references. Here are a few examples.

There are also optional Stripping and Drinking rules for the game with the addition of the NSFW deck.

One of the cards throughout the evening that gave me the most trouble? Pandamonium… my brother had it in his stable, rendering all of his unicorns into pandas. Multiple times I played cards to try and kill or affect his army, but since none of them were actually unicorns, I did not succeed. He didn’t win that round because they were all pandas and he couldn’t destroy this frustrating card…. but it was still not fun. My angry Narwhal mini plush was not amused.

Overall, we really loved this game. It was easy to learn but will be fun to master. In the three games we played (one with just the bast set and the other two with the NSFW pack added), we still did not see all of the cards that can be played, which is very nice. Sometimes games get old because there is a lot of repetitiveness… this game is (so far) nothing like that.

If you would like to order some Unstable Unicorns for yourself, you can head over to the website to get the base game and NSFW pack that we reviewed here, but also currently the Dragons Pack and the Rainbow Sprinkles Pack. I know I will be ordering the other two expansion packs for sure.