Matchbox is in many ways identical to the Wheatley board, but smaller and more simple. The STM32H7 of Wheatley has been replaced with an STM32F4 with significantly less GPIO. Everything else is almost identical, though. The sensors have been removed, it doesn't particularly need to know its height, GPS location, the relative barometric pressure, etc. It simply needs to receive a radio signal to trigger a mosfet and not much else.
One goal of the Matchbox line of computers was to be a test bed for different MOSFETS for pyrotechnic deployment. I would like to test different means of deploying recovery systems and testing different boards (while potentially cooking components) was important to do at low cost. I don't really want to melt a Wheatley board if I can help it, all because my math was a bit off. A sacrificial board is much more helpful for that. Plus the lack of complexity means I can pretty quickly isolate issues. If, for example, a rocket motor does not fire, there's a fixed number of items that it could be on this board.
The reason behind the name "Matchbox" was a no-brainer, really. What does it do? It lights rockets, like an e-match. It's also a much smaller variation of my boards, like a Matchbox car to a real car. It does not conform to the bread-based punnery of the mainline flight computers, but I think this is worth an exception.