Tag Team
Designed by: Corentin Lebrat,Gricha German
Tag Team is a two-player battle of four fighters – two each side – going hammer and tongs at each other until one achieves a knock-out victory.
For your first play, the game suggests Joan and Ching Shah versus Bodvar and Wong Wei-Hung, but there are a dozen fighters in the box, offering numerous combinations. Each player has a fighter board that tracks their fighters health and a place to score any special tokens for abilities and power cubes – we’ll come to power cubes shortly – that fighter might have. Each fighter comes with a bespoke deck of cards as well: the black-bordered one is the starting card – for now, just take the starting cards for your two fighters and choose in what order they’ll be revealed: this is the fledgling ‘fight deck’ and the other cards are your build deck.
Both players reveal their cards one at a time, and activate them. Largely the cards are pretty simple – they might do an attack (to the power of this characters’ current power cubes) or defend, or they might activate a special ability. The special abilities are numerous and we won’t go into them here: suffice to say, most are very straightforward and they’re all about either attacking your opponent or recovering your own fights.
After this short opening round, each player gets to add one card to their fight deck: take the top three off your build deck and choose one to keep (the others go to the bottom of your build deck). Critically, whilst you can add a new card to any position in the fight deck, you can’t otherwise change the order of them!
The reveal/activate/build rhythm sets the tone of the game: as soon as any one fighter’s health reaches the bottom of their track, this is considered a knockout: the KO-ed player loses, and the other wins. There are other ways the game can end but they happen infrequently: if someone’s build deck runs out or – very rarely – two fighters knock each other out at the same time, the fight – and the game! – is a draw.
Sam says
Essentially, this is a punch-up, but one with a sizeable twist: players don’t know who’ll be punching who until those cards are flipped over. There are heaps of games where two players are basically in a fight to the death (or a K.O, as here) but Tag Team’s method is partly what makes it stand out: as well as adding in an extra card each round, you’re also trying to bear in mind the order – or some vague idea of it – that your opponents’ cards are in, because there may be an attack you really want to block or one you want to mount when your opponent is undefended… and this moderate tweak, along with the tagging between fighters on the same team, makes the game deftly avoid the kind of attritional feeling that some of these head-to-head games can suffer from. The dozen fighters offer various combinations to explore as well. It’s a fun ten or fifteen minutes, well presented, but sometimes the game can feel so arbitrary in what cards you draw that when it’s over you can feel like there was a start and an end but no middle. Maybe multiple plays will help fix that, however, as you come to appreciate the good fighter combinations and get better at working out which cards work best together. As I write I’ve only played five times, and whilst it hasn’t been a bona fide hit, I’d be up for more.
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Take That!
Yes, yes, and yes again. It's a wrestling machine with lightning bolts and fireballs. But it generally only takes ten minutes...
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Fidget Factor!
...and it's a very fast-moving ten minutes at that.
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Brain Burn!
Light. Good players will look for cards that synergise well with their fight deck, whilst also keeping their opponent's in mind: memory can be helpful. But you can play completely randomly, still have fun, and maybe even win.
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Again Again!
Lots of variety in the box and the game is quick, and quick-moving.
