Tag Team
Publisher: Le Scorpion Masque/distributed by Hachette Boardgames
Release Date: Fall 2025
Price: $24.99
Creators: Gricha German, Corentin Lebrat
Format: card game, low complexity, 2 players,
Playing time: 15 minutes, per publisher
Age Rating: age 10+, per publisher
ICv2 Rating: 3 Stars out of 5
This is by no means a bad game, but it is one that will not appeal to everyone. It is chaos surrounded by a dozen small decks of cards.
Imagine playing an old-school video game of martial arts combat, but with cards. Then, add a layer of oddity, in that the characters come from a variety of sources: history, folklore, video games, and one seems to be based on Milady de Winter from The Three Musketeers. Every combatant character has different rules and a different deck of cards.
Now, make that concept into sort of a deck builder of programmed combat. On the first turn of the game, each player has chosen two combatants to form their tag team for the fight. Each combatant has a required first card. Each player must choose which of the two cards to play first, and that is the order in which those two cards are played for the entire game. The other cards from both combatants are shuffled into a deck, and at the end of each combat round, a single card is added to the fight deck from a small number chosen from that deck. That one card is added anywhere to the fight deck, which is never shuffled.
So, each round your opponent knows what cards you played, in what order, and can plan for those for next round. The trick is that the card you add can be added first, or in between, or at the end. This matters because cards are played simultaneously, in order, from both players. If a card blocks an attack and negates it, great! If you use your block while your opponent has used a non-attack, then you have mostly wasted your block, and you don’t have that many of them with most combatants. To make it a bit more complex, since you have cards from both combatants in your deck, the one whose card you play on any turn is the fighter for that action and takes any damage from return attacks. Some cards from some combatants can affect both opponents or their own partner.
A game is ended when one character from a tag team is knocked out. The team with both characters still standing wins. If one character from each team is knocked out on the same action, it’s a draw, unless one of the two has a rule that says otherwise.
The resulting game is fun, but chaotic, because of the wild range of combatants. There is a system of suggested difficulty in playing them, so it is possible to choose fights that are somewhat balanced, but the system seems to be based on how tricky a combatant is to play, not how powerful it is.
For those who have always wanted to play a tag-team martial arts battle of Milady de Winter and the Golem of Prague vs. Joan of Arc and a Norse berserker, then this may their only chance. The outcome of the game may be decided by where they place a card in their deck early on, though, and that can be frustrating.
The short length of each game makes this more of a filler than a main game, but learning the way to play each combatant has a bit of a learning curve, so in practice it may be better to play few rounds in one session just to learn what you are doing.
The artwork for the cards and for the tokens is good. The rules are brief and well written, and there is a supplementary pamphlet to explain the special rules for the various combatants, as well as including answers to questions about some likely interactions between those rules. The low price point makes it accessible.
—Nick Smith
Source: ICv2
