Tag Team – More Tagging, Less Team

If there’s anything I remember from my days watching the men’s soap opera known as wrestling, it’s that the tag team fights always led to some crazy shenanigans. Maybe someone will turn on their partner, maybe they’ll distract the ref. But what was always true was that two fighters per team was way more interesting than a 1-on-1 fight.

It’s that truth that Scorpion Masqué is leaning on in one of their new two-player titles, Tag Team. Tag Team is exactly that; a two-player game where each player controls two fighters, paired up to combat their opponents.

Gricha German and Corentin Lebrat designed this unique deck building, deck programming game to be quick and easy. A typical game lasts less than 20 minutes and is playable by anyone 10+.

Setup

Setup for Tag Team understandably requires each player selecting two characters from the 12 available in the box. The rulebook has various methods for selecting them, but what’s important is that each player ends up with two. Each character has a particular combat style, so as you grow in familiarity with the characters, your choices may change. For your first game, the rulebook recommends one player use Joan and Ching Shih, and the other player take Bödvar and Wong Fei-Hung.

Once you’ve chosen your fighters, take each fighter’s starting card (White star on the card) as your opening hand. Put these two cards in whatever order you’d like, facedown.

Then, shuffle their remaining fight cards together to create an 18 card build deck.

Take your fighter boards and put health markers on the start space on each board. Take power cubes equal to each fighter’s base power and put them above the board. Finally, take any special tokens your fighter requires.

Time to fight!

How to Play

Tag Team is an auto-battler, which means you make all of the decisions up front, then let them play out.

The Fight Step

The first part of each turn is the fight step. During this step, you and your opponent flip the top card of your fight deck and do what the card says. These cards will have a series of icons on them, related to attacking, blocking, or gaining power or health.

Repeat this for every card in your fight deck (yes, that’s only two cards at the beginning of the game!). When this is done, move on to the build step. It’s important to keep your cards in the same order! If no characters have been knocked out, it’s time to move to the build step.

The Build Step

Draw three cards from the build deck and choose one to add to your fight deck. Add this card anywhere in the deck, potentially changing the timing on how various cards appear against your opponent’s cards. You cannot rearrange other cards, though. For the two cards you didn’t pick, place them at the bottom of your build deck.

Put your fight deck face down again. It’s time to fight once more!

Ending the Game

Continue fighting in this way until one player knocks out at least one of their opponent’s characters by reducing their health to zero. That player wins!

If you’re somehow still playing when the build deck has fewer than three remaining cards, the match is a draw. Similarly, if during a turn both players knock out an opposing character, the game is a draw.

Game Taxonomy

In addition to the icons on the cards, there are a lot of important terms you’ll need to know when playing Tag Team. Most are easily understandable, but it does warrant a thorough read-through of the rules in advance of playing the game. We won’t get into all of the specifics here but will cover some nuances in the Impressions section below.

Impressions

Flexible Strategy

Tag Team is a game of patience and going with the flow. If you, as a gamer, are fairly inflexible, you’ll struggle with Tag Team. I had a difficult time in the beginning because I wanted to play my way regardless of the characters. If that’s you, Tag Team is not your game. And in the beginning, it wasn’t for me, either. Letting go of my expectations of how I was going to play really enhanced my experience.

So, be willing to flex and change depending on the characters (and specifically the combination of characters). If you are, you’ll enjoy the puzzle of trying to figure out how to make a given team work. Active fighters interact with their partners (giving the passive character power, or healing them, or some other effects). So, it’s always interesting to see how you can find some kind of synergy between your fighters.

Some Warnings

Of course, this also leads to a frustration for newer players, and a clear knowledge advantage for experienced players. There are 12 different fighters leading to more than 60 fighter combinations. And because you’ll never use every card in a play, each fighter combination requires multiple play throughs to see everything.

The short play time does help, though. Patience, experimentation, and tenacity make Tag Team an intriguing proposition for two gamers who aren’t afraid to keep going at it. The speed of the game makes losses sting less, and the “Just one more time” of Tag Team is strong.

And finally, the creators of Tag Team chose to use all original characters for this game, which made it harder for us to connect with them. This isn’t a bad thing, but we’re on record as loving the use of IP, or even public domain characters that we can get our hooks into. We actually took to calling some of the fighters by names of other characters anyway.

A Comparison

If we’re being truthful, we had this same issue with games like Dice Throne and others in years’ past. So if this doesn’t bother you, it’s not a concern.

And that’s something else Tag Team shares with Dice Throne; the quality of the art. Xavier Gueniffey Durin’s gorgeous, rich illustration covers every flat surface of Tag Team, evoking the mood of an anime battle with every art piece.

Final Thoughts

Lots of people enjoy Tag Team and it’s not hard to see why. The simultaneous play, the seemingly endless combinations, and the lighting quick turnaround from game to game make Tag Team a winner for the right kinds of players.

So, do you want to get your battle on? If so, get your own copy of Tag Team directly from Hachette Boardgames, on Amazon, or at your friendly local game store.

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Hachette Boardgames provided The Family Gamers with a promotional copy of Tag Team for this review

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