Imagine a board game where you just flip over a card and something happens. And it’s a fighting game. That sounds exciting, right? Not really, that sounds like it should be a really dull time. But that is what the game Tag Team from Scorpion Masque by Gricha German and Corentin Lebrat is. And it is a game that is pretty popular, but is it a good game? Let’s see how Tag Team is played and what works and doesn’t work about the game before we decide.

How To Play Tag Team

Tag Team is an autobattler game. What that means in this case is you flip cards and those cards do affects. Your goal is to knock out one of the other players fighters before they knock out one of yours. But let’s talk a little bit more about how that works.

The Fighters

Each player is going to get two fighters. These fighters offer different ways to play the game. Some are more support characters while others are damage dealers. You pick your fighters in a few different ways. One is to just randomly assign or assign “starting” difficulty characters.

The other ways are drafting. You may draft the simple or competitive way. In the simple draft you select one character from your hand of cards and then swap with your opponent and select another character there. The competitive way is to select like before and then discard a character. Then you swap hands and select a new character.

Combat

Combat is simple, you create your deck or two cards to start and you put them in an order you choose. You each flip your first card and do what that says. Then you flip the next card and do what that says. And that is how combat works.

Between Combat Rounds

The meat of the game is in the choice here between combat rounds. Between rounds you draw from your action deck. The action deck consists of the non-starting cards for your two characters. You draw three of those cards and you select one to add to your deck.

When you add a card to your deck it must slot into the deck as it already is. So when you pick your third card, after the first combat phase, you can put it on top, between the two cards, or the bottom of the deck. This is because the deck never gets shuffled, so the order is maintained between rounds. The only way to change up the order of your deck is where you slot the new card in, and that changes it in comparison to your opponents deck possibly.

What Doesn’t Work

The decision space is limited. I think that is going to be a negative for some people. Mainly because the decision space is also based off of imperfect information. I know what and where you cards are from the previous round. I don’t know where you might add something in. So if you play a strong attack, I might move to block it, but you can play a card above it to push it down further. So it feels like guess work, or it might to some.

What Works

Firstly, I want to talk about the characters. This is like Dice Throne in that each character is going to be different. And like Dice Throne there are going to be elements that might feel similar between characters. It’s about blocking and attacking at the right time. So yes, that is something that exists in all decks. But each character is going to have a little twist on it. I plan to do my ranking of all the characters in the future. I want to do that because the characters are different.

The ease to the table is also great for the game. Every card does a good job of explaining what is on the card. So while they give you a little booklet to learn about the characters, that is not needed when you play. All the information to play the characters is on the card as you flip it. And they do this with text and symbols. So I use the text as a learn a character and then symbols after that because it’s faster.

I like the decision space a lot as well in the game. It is a fun head game to try and figure out where you place a new card into your deck. I know that you know I know where you best attack is, so you move it one lower. But I know that you know so you are going to adjust it so I adjust where I place my defensive new card. Unless of course you try and trick me and don’t adjust it.

Finally the speed of the game is great. It is fast to get to the table and it is fast to play. I think it is one that I rarely will ever play one match-up in a sitting.

Who Is Tag Team For?

I think Tag Team is for people who like a good head to head game. When you play it, it’s easy to learn and easy to play, so it’s a good one to play with people who like lighter games. I also think that it’s a great game for people who often want to play a game but find they only have a short time. It has good moments in the game as you block a big attack or sneak one through, but it is also really fast, so you can play multiple times in a sitting.

Tag Team Grade and Final Thoughts

I really like this game. I think that Tag Team works as a fast battling game to the point where it is going to likely get played more than Dice Throne. Now I love Dice Throne because there are more decisions to make in the game. But I thought that an autobattler could maybe only kind of work. But it is a game that works really well.

I think the big reason that it works so well is the different characters. Each one feels different and you need to plan out how you add cards and how you plan in the game. And it is so fast of a game. I think we played two games in person last night and it was maybe 10-15 minutes tops for each battle. The second was faster than the first even with more complex characters. It is going to go high in my Top 100 next year if I keep on playing it a lot because it’s that good.

My Grade: A
Gamer Grade: B-
Casual Grade: A
Strategy (out of 10): 4
Luck (out of 10): 5

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