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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It’s worth noting before I start that some of these games were “Gen Con releases”. They were available prior to Gen Con at other sources but Gen Con was the first convention that they were widely at in the United States.

My Gen Con Haul

Tricky Kids

The first three are going to be the ones that a friend picked up from Gen Con for me. Tricky Kids is a trick taking game. The twist on this trick taking game is that the cards do not have numbers on them. Instead when you get your hand of seven cards you write down the numbers, which need to total up to 21 points.

There is more than that as well. As you play out the tricks, the points you get are from the chips that you take. And you know what order those chips are going to come out in. So while everything might give you some points, you may want to avoid winning a trick in hopes of taking a trick later in the hand. This just sounds brain burning and fun.

Slam Throne

Slam Throne is pogs. Yup, it’s as simple as that, but it’s pogs with the Dice Throne theme. I believe it was four characters who were released, granted you don’t know who you get. This one just looks like silly fun and that is what drew me into it. Plus I love Dice Throne so I want to support the company when they make a product that I think looks fun. Is it going to be great, I doubt it, but sometimes fun is just what you want.

First-Class Letters

I like roll and write games. But First-Class Letters is not like the typical roll and write game. This is a word game with roll and write elements to it. It’s about creating words and putting them in order. But each time you roll letters you get more points for using all three of the letters. But there is always a letter that you cannot use, and as you can guess that’s generally a vowel.

To add to that you need to put your words in alphabetical order. That might not be too hard, but as you get down to it, you become more and more limited as gaps between letters start to shrink. And at the beginning of the game you seed three spots with starting letters, so that can add to the challenge as well. I think this sounds like a ton of fun, though I can see why some people may not like it because it is a word game.

Trinket Trove

From the same company as First-Class Letters, though I didn’t get this one picked up for me at Gen Con, is Trinket Trove. Trinket Trove is a set collection game. But to collect cards you need to bid to draft them. The twist on this is that as you bid to draft cards, the more cards you bid, the sooner you go. But also, the cards that you bid are now a pile of cards that someone else can take. The set collection aspect looks simple, so it is the bidding that really excites me for this game.

No Loose Ends

Also from the same company, which is GameHead, we have No Loose Ends. No Loose Ends is a trick taking game where you want to win certain types of tricks. How do you determine that, well, you use cards from your hand to indicate what type of trick you are going to take. I like this balancing act as it’s a twist on the normal bidding. I need to decide if I can win a blue trick or two but I need to play out two blue cards are bids, for example. That sounds like a fun trick taking twist to me.

Vantage

Vantage from Stonemaier Games is one of the ones that was released before Gen Con. And I pre-ordered it before Gen Con. But this is an open world adventure game. You get a mission to complete as a group at the start of the game. And then you get dropped into a world.

This is a game where you can win, but it’s more about the experience. What is the world like, what adventures will you go on? I also hear that it is better in that one to maybe three player range. And that is because while it is engaging to be part of the story at the table, it is downtime between turns. So I like it for a one off sandbox game when I want to play an open world game.

Otter

Otter is one that wasn’t on my radar going into Gen Con. It is only because of hearing about it that I pre-ordered this one, or late pledged it, on crowdfunding. Otter is a card shedding game. By that I mean you want to empty your hand completely. But if you don’t, you draw back up and try again.

Each otter has a head and tail that are give you a rule. So it might be something like the next card you play is two or less different from the previous card and it is of the fish suit. If you match both things you can keep on playing on that one until you only match one of the two. And there are three otters in play, so you want to try and match all of them.

I like the sound of this one because it sounds simple to learn but tricky to play.

Tag Team

This one the Man vs Meeple channel was the one that brought it to my attention. The game is interesting because it is what is known as an autobattler. That means that you have your two heroes and your opponent has two and the cards just battle themselves. That is not something that sounds like a great game there.

The trick is what as you start you have two cards. You battle both of them out. Then you draw three more cards and you add one of them to your deck. You don’t rearrange the cards in your deck, but you add that one and you decide, do I add it at the top, middle or bottom. Effectively when will cards activate. As you start to know your opponents card you ask yourself, when are they going to activate their big attack, and can I block that time. But they know that, so do they adjust where it is in the deck when they add a new card above it, or keep it in the same spot?

Ace of Spades

Finally is Ace of Spades. I won’t say too much on this one because I already wrote a review for it. You can read the review for Ace of Spades here. Devir has another hit game and one that sold out really fast each day at Gen Con. This is a solo or two player game where you battle a boss by playing out poker hands. It is easy to learn and play but offers some fun challenges as you go along.

The one thing that I think keeps this from being more so for everyone is that it is somewhat lucky. Yes you can manipulate your hand with discards and draws, but sometimes you might not be able to beat the boss just because you drew poorly. I still love the game and think that it’s a very good game with fun mechanisms and a great theme.

Final Thoughts

Clearly without going to Gen Con you can still find Gen Con games. And I love that Devir put Ace of Spades on a free shipping sale during Gen Con. So if you were at the show you could stand in line to buy it or you could just order it. And since I wasn’t, I still could get it at Gen Con prices like I had picked it up there. I hope more companies, when they can, follow suit with that. Makes me feel better when I can’t go.

Out of these games that I haven’t played, I think I am most excited for Tag Team. I love the sound of that game and the characters all look cool. But I want to play all of them. And so many of them offer interesting twists on what you do in the game. What is the Gen Con release that you are most excited about playing or did you pick-up?

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