Review: Tag Team

Introduction & Overview

Fight to knock out your opponent—every decision counts! ROUND 1… FIGHT! In this competitive 2-player fighting game, you will need to assemble your own duo of two fighters and build the ultimate synergy by combining their unique decks. A programmed combat game and a deck-builder all at once… with a twist!

This is the premise behind Tag Team, designed by Gricha German (Biomos) and Corentin Lebrat (Faraway, Draftosaurus). First published in 2025 by Scorpion Masqué in a bilingual French and English edition, it features artwork by Xavier Gueniffey Durin “Naïade”, the artist behind titles such as Seasons and Zenith.

It is published in Spain by Asmodee (the game has slight language dependence on some card effects, in addition to the rulebook). It plays strictly at 2 players, with a recommended age of 10 and up, and an approximate duration of 15 minutes. The MSRP is €24.95. For this review, we used a copy of the Spanish edition by Asmodee, kindly provided by the publisher as a review copy.

Important: if you already know the game and/or are only interested in my opinion about it, you can go directly to the Opinion section. The Content and Mechanics sections are especially intended for those who do not know the game and prefer to get a general idea of how it works.

Go to Personal Opinion

Components

Inside a two-piece cardboard box (lid and bottom) measuring 23×16×5.2 cm (a small rectangular box similar to Codenames), we find the following items:

• 12 Fighter Boards (cardstock)
• 120 Combat Cards (57×88 mm)
• 12 Selection Cards (61×112 mm)
• 21 Tokens (punchboard)
• 40 Power Cubes (plastic)
• 6 Health Trackers (wooden)
• 4 Special Trackers (wooden)
• Combat Rulebook
• Fighter Guide

How to Play

Tag Team is an auto-battler and deck-building game where each player commands a tag team of two characters to face off against their opponent. The game unfolds over a series of rounds divided into a combat phase and an upgrade phase. During combat, both players simultaneously reveal the top card of their fight deck (which starts with just two cards) and must resolve its effects. These actions allow fighters to attack and drain opponent health based on accumulated power, block incoming damage to trigger secondary perks, heal wounds, or generate fresh power cubes. As health trackers move along personal player boards, they may cross threshold icons that immediately trigger bonus effects. Once fight decks run out, the build phase begins: each player draws three cards from their reserve deck, secretly chooses one to insert into any position of their combat deck without altering the order of the existing cards, and discards the rest. This cycle of programming and battling repeats uninterrupted until one fighter’s health reaches the KO space, at which point the opposing team is crowned victorious.

Key Concepts

Let’s begin with the Selection Cards. They are used before combat starts to draft each player’s team. At the beginning of the match, players receive a hand of these cards and, through a card-drafting procedure, select the two fighters that will form their duo, returning the rest to the box once setup is complete.

The Fighter Boards represent each available character and are placed directly in front of the players in their play area. They display the character’s base power and feature a health track with numbered spaces culminating in a final KO space. Additionally, their upper section provides storage for the power cube pool and, depending on the fighter, they display specialized gauges or spaces tailored to character-specific mechanics.

Depending on the chosen combatants, players may bring Tokens and Special Trackers into play. These serve to handle character-exclusive mechanics. Placed on or beside the fighter boards during setup, they track unique statuses, abilities, or progression along custom meters throughout the bout.

Power Cubes represent the amount of health an opponent will lose whenever a fighter executes an attack action. Fighters can gain or lose cubes during the game via various card or board effects, but these cubes are never spent or discarded upon resolving an attack.

Along each health track, Health Trackers slide vertically. The tracker drops when taking damage from attacks or direct damage, and rises when resolving healing effects, triggering elimination and defeat for that team if either teammate’s marker ever hits the KO space.

Finally, and most importantly, we have the Combat Cards. These comprise each fighter’s bespoke action deck, displaying character icons, card titles, and actionable effects. Players combine the cards of both chosen fighters to form an initial combat deck on the table alongside a reserve construction deck. During play, these cards are revealed simultaneously to execute attacks, blocks, healing, and other tactical maneuvers, gradually receiving reinforcements from the reserve deck to refine action sequences, as the combat deck is never shuffled or rearranged.

That is enough to get started.

Preparación de la Partida

1. Each player picks a fighter pair or drafts them using the selection cards, placing both fighter boards in their personal play area. Any unused selection cards and fighter boards are returned to the box.
2. Players take the green health trackers and place one on the starting space of each of their fighters’ health tracks.
3. Take a number of purple power cubes equal to each fighter’s base power and place them in their respective power pools on their boards.
4. Following the instructions in the Fighter Guide, place any required special trackers or tokens on the tracks or next to the boards of fighters that use them.
5. Each player gathers the 10-card decks for their two fighters and separates each character’s starting card, easily identified by its black border and star icon.
6. Next, each combatant takes their two starting cards, secretly decides the order in which to play them, and stacks them face down in front of themselves—placing the first card they wish to resolve on top—to form their combat deck.
7. Then, shuffle the remaining 9 cards of each fighter together to create an 18-card draw deck, placed face down next to their boards.
8. Finally, both players read their fighters’ section in the guide to familiarize themselves with their unique abilities.

We are ready to begin!

Game Flow

A game of Tag Team is played over an indeterminate series of rounds. Each round is split into two phases.

Phase I: Combat

This phase consists of a series of turns played simultaneously until both players run through their combat decks (consisting of 2 cards in the first round, growing by 1 card each subsequent round) or until a fighter is knocked out.

Each turn, players proceed as follows:

1. Reveal Card. Both players simultaneously flip the top card of their combat deck and place it over the card played in the previous turn. The character matching the symbol on the played card becomes the Active Fighter for that turn, while the other team member acts as the Tag Partner.
2. Execute Actions. The effects shown on both played cards resolve simultaneously. As a general rule, attacks target the opposing Active Fighter by default, and attack values reference the power that fighter held at the exact start of the turn (power gains or losses during the turn do not modify an attack in progress).

The primary card actions include:

• Attack. Reduces the opposing fighter’s health by an amount equal to the attacker’s power cubes at the start of the turn.
• Block. Cancels all attacks made by the opponent or their partner during that turn. Furthermore, if the block successfully negates at least one attack (even an attack with 0 power), it triggers the bonus action printed on the card.
• Direct Damage. Inflicts an unpreventable loss of health equal to the printed value. Since it is not classified as an attack, it cannot be stopped by a block action.
• Heal. The fighter recovers health points equal to the action value, advancing their marker upward along their track (never exceeding their maximum value).
• Gain / Lose Power. Adds or removes the specified number of power cubes to or from the indicated fighter’s personal pool.
• Transfer. Moves power cubes or other indicated components from one fighter’s pool to their teammate’s pool up to the specified amount (always up to the maximum possible).
• Cancel. Completely nullifies the effect of the card played by the opponent this turn.

If a fighter receives both damage and healing in the same turn, only the net difference is applied to their health tracker. If a health tracker enters a space showing a stop symbol, its movement ceases immediately, forfeiting any remaining steps forward or backward. Likewise, any icon crossed or reached on the health track triggers simultaneously once all marker movement resolves.

Once all combat deck cards have been exhausted without a KO occurring, the combat phase ends. At no point should the combat deck ever be shuffled.

Phase II: Deck-Building

Players tweak and expand their combat deck sequence for future rounds by resolving the following steps in order:

1. Draw Cards. Each player secretly draws the top 3 cards from their reserve deck.
2. Add a Card. Each player secretly selects one of those three cards and adds it to their combat deck. This card may be placed on top, on the bottom, or inserted into any slot between existing cards, preserving the established relative order of the current deck (altering the sequence of previous cards is strictly forbidden). If the chosen card features an Instant Bonus (marked with a warning icon), the player announces the effect to their opponent and resolves it immediately after insertion, without needing to reveal the card’s identity or its placement in the deck.
3. Discard Cards. The 2 unselected cards are placed on the bottom of the player’s reserve deck in any order.

Following this, both players place their combat deck face down in front of their boards, and a new round begins back in the Combat Phase.

Game End

The game ends immediately at the conclusion of any turn in which one of the following conditions is met:

• KO. A fighter’s health is reduced to the KO space at the end of a turn. Play stops immediately, and the player controlling that character loses the match, handing victory to their rival. A fighter on the KO space cannot be healed back up.
• Double KO. At least two fighters on opposing teams are eliminated (reach the KO space) during the exact same turn. In this case, the bout ends in a draw.
• Reserve Deck Exhaustion. If a player must draw during the deck-building phase and cannot draw at least 3 cards from their reserve deck, the game concludes immediately in an exhaustion draw.

Personal Opinion

If you are sporting a few grey hairs and happen to be from my generation, that is, born in the nineteen-eighties, you almost certainly cherish fond memories of afternoons spent in arcade halls. Few feelings matched the ritual of placing a coin on the cabinet bezel, waiting in line to challenge whoever was dominating the machine at Street Fighter II, Fatal Fury, or The King of Fighters. Those were matches charged with pure tension that rewarded fast reflexes, but also psychological reads to anticipate your rival’s next move—a competitive liturgy burned into our collective memory.

There have been plenty of attempts to bring that experience to the tabletop, almost always stumbling over the very same hurdle. Look at adaptations using systems like the Universal Tactics System with franchises such as Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. While visually striking and aimed at pleasing the fandom, these games often suffer from rules bloat and cumbersome overhead. Structuring bouts around such dense tactical engines inevitably drains the genre’s inherent spark, completely losing the snappy, immediate essence of classic arcade games where everything hung on pace, fluidity, and split-second reactions—qualities that are notoriously difficult to emulate with cardboard.

At least until recently, when one of the biggest hobby hits in recent years burst onto the scene: Challengers! That title stripped deck-building down to its bare essentials to drive an idiosyncratic auto-battling engine. The premise involved drafting a single card per round into a deck that was repeatedly shuffled, only to flip cards off the top and let the automated resolution play itself out.

That dynamic always felt to me like setting up an endless chain of dominoes: spending hours lining up every piece with surgical care, only to flick the first one and passively watch the cascade unfold. An awful lot of setup and procedural theater just for the core outcome to resolve with practically zero ongoing input from the players.

Tastes aside, Challengers! undeniably struck a chord with the hobby, rapidly cementing itself as a full-blown franchise. And we all know full well what happens in this industry whenever a design catches fire on game tables: publishers and designers rush out in droves to catch the wave, each offering their own spin on the concept. That is precisely where today’s subject enters the ring. Let’s see how Tag Team holds up, but not before thanking Asmodee for providing the review copy that made this long breakdown possible.

Tag Team plunges us straight into tag-team clashes where two contenders forge an unbreakable partnership to topple the opposing corner. There is no room here for cautious diplomacy or tentative pacing: it is a head-on collision of fighting styles where each combatant injects distinct flair, background, and charisma into every exchange. The bell clangs against the canvas, the crowd roars from the stands, and tension crackles in the air as fighters lock eyes right before trading blows. Pure adrenaline.

Mechanically speaking, Tag Team is an auto-battler driven by deck-building where, rather remarkably, combat decks are never shuffled (though the reserve draw deck is shuffled during initial setup). Each player assembles a duo of two fighters, each sporting unique traits and their own tailored card pool.

Both competitors start with just two cards in their combat deck—one for each fighter on their team. The bout is broken down into rounds consisting of two phases. First, during combat, both players flip the top card of their deck simultaneously, resolving effects at the same time. These allow you to strike based on built-up power, parry incoming enemy hits, restore lost health, or buff stats. It creates a tightly choreographed exchange of blows that ticks forward turn by turn until the decks run dry.

Once the dust settles from that flurry of strikes, the build phase begins. Players draw three cards from their reserve deck and secretly pick one to sleeve into their combat deck. The crux of the mechanism is that the relative order established in prior rounds remains locked: the new card can go on top, on the bottom, or wedged between any two existing cards in the combat deck. The objective is to align your defensive answers with the exact incoming strikes you know your opponent must play at that step, plotting an increasingly lethal sequence that expands by one card every round.

Matches end the instant any fighter’s health marker slides into the knockout zone at the close of a turn, awarding immediate victory to the opposing team. There is no need to flatten both rivals: exploiting the single weakest link is enough to force a submission. Should both sides hit the canvas simultaneously, or if the reserve deck is depleted, the fight ends in a draw.

That should provide plenty of context to delve into the underlying dynamics and table feel. Anyone who has played Challengers! will undoubtedly experience persistent déjà vu hearing this premise. Mechanically, the framework is almost a carbon copy: prep a card pool and let it resolve through automated confrontation. However, Tag Team injects an adjustment that appears subtle on paper but proves transformative in practice: the combat deck is never shuffled. Consequently, rather than standard deck-building, we are engaging in sequence-building, where the randomness of card draws is stripped away in favor of calculated tactical programming.

This sequence construction radically alters the table dynamic, sparking a captivating psychological mind game. Picture that crushing attack from your opponent that battered you in earlier rounds, which you are desperate to neutralize with a block. Pulling that off requires more than just drafting a shield; you must slot it into the exact position where you predict that blow will land. Of course, your adversary will not just stand idle. Anticipating your read, they might slip a card right before that strike to delay it by a beat, causing your guard to parry thin air while their heavy hit lands squarely on the following turn.

Managing power buffs presents another ongoing puzzle. It is frequently tempting to program early cards that ramp up your cube pool, hoping to unleash a devastating barrage across the back half of the round. Your opponent, however, can sniff out that setup and counter by loading the front of their sequence with quick, direct hits, chewing through your health pool before your damage engine comes online. This arms race forces you to weigh whether to push your power curve or rein in the enemy’s momentum before their hits scale beyond recovery.

Team interaction and healing windows cannot be neglected either. It is common to see a player chain support cards to salvage a battered teammate, timing that burst of recovery right before a lethal turn. The psychological counterplay is obvious: if the rival spots that desperate need to heal, they can drop a massive strike right into that slot or redirect their pressure toward the unprotected partner. What emerges is a relentless cat-and-mouse duel, where every secret card insertion acts as a latent bluff waiting to trigger next round.

In that regard, I find that Tag Team succeeds decisively right where Challengers!, in my view, fell flat on its face. As you may know, I belong to that camp of players that views Johannes Krenner and Markus Slawitscheck’s hit as smoke and mirrors: a charming, breezy distraction for rowdy party game nights, but one featuring minimal agency. Granting players complete control over the exact sequence placement of every drafted card fundamentally elevates the formula, infusing every build phase with palpable tension and genuine tactical grit.

Another major feather in the design’s cap is the sheer speed at which bouts resolve. Character asymmetry and quirks notwithstanding, turns fly by because card effects are kept remarkably atomic. There are no convoluted decision trees in mid-brawl or walls of rules text stalling the action: hit for your power, throw up a guard, chip away health, or stockpile cubes. The gameplay is lean, snappy, and propulsive, maintaining a relentless cadence that nails the arcade spirit it channels.

Alongside these strengths, the game does feature a few rough edges worth highlighting, chief among them being a modest but noticeable barrier to entry. The box packs twelve distinct fighters, each armed with individual gimmicks, mechanics, and specialized interactions. While the actual rules overhead remains low for most combatants, pausing to digest, balance, and explain how each character operates before playing is still a hurdle. This initial friction exists, though fortunately it evaporates after a handful of plays (especially if each early session introduces four new characters across the table).

Occasional bouts of draw luck can also prove mildly frustrating. While players command the tempo and architecture of their fight deck, they remain subject to the whims of card draw when accessing the reserve pile. You might run into an opening draw that floods you with cards for a single fighter, forcing you to play them and leaving that character exposed to concentrated direct damage while your opponent spreads their damage smoothly. Getting constrained by an awkward draw is annoying, even if the odds of pulling three cards from the same fighter in consecutive rounds remain fairly slim.

Furthermore, as much as I appreciate the tactical depth of plotting card order, it pays to stay grounded about the design’s ultimate weight. At its core, the actual turn-to-turn decision space is very light. It delivers ongoing psychological tension, certainly, but it functions primarily as a fast-playing diversion that skirts right on the edge of the 2-player filler category. Much of its staying power comes from the variety provided by the twelve fighters and the sheer volume of matchup permutations they offer. If that profile fits your gaming group, it has enough variety to hit the table regularly.

Personally, I gravitate toward this design over heavier dueling games that carry far more baggage. When thinking of head-to-head card battlers like Mindbug (read the tocho-review here) or Radlands (read the tocho-review here), their underlying mechanics may differ (hand management, card lane combat), but they fundamentally deliver a 1v1 showdown. Given that context, I often prefer something breezy and immediate like Tag Team.

Looking at production values, the components are thoroughly functional: most pieces consist of cards across diverse dimensions, featuring decent cardstock, smooth finish, and adequate snap (sleeving the fighter decks is strongly recommended to prevent wear marks, which would spoil the hidden programming). The rulebook is logically organized, and having character breakdowns housed in a dedicated supplement is a welcome touch.

Some might argue that Challengers! holds an edge over Tag Team by accommodating player counts up to six. In practice, that higher count is largely an illusion, as play simply fragments into simultaneous heads-up matches, yielding essentially the same dynamic as a dedicated two-player duel. With the right selection of fighters, one could easily run two parallel games out of this box—each player running two fighters—provided you avoid the specific character requiring three health trackers.

Visually, Naïade leans hard into modern comic styling and arcade fighter tropes, driven by clean, kinetic, and expressive linework. The palette is rich and luminous, dominated by warm hues, punchy yellows, and high-contrast accents that amplify the sense of impact. Across both the cover and character cards, the fighters strike theatrical poses with sharp angles that convey instant momentum, sculpted with soft yet defined cell shading. For the action cards, the art is cleverly distilled for functional clarity: panels use schematic silhouettes, crisp icons, and clean backdrops. This balance between flashy presentation and graphic usability keeps the table state legible and the pacing swift.

And let’s wrap this up. Tag Team delivers an auto-battler built entirely around sequence-building, given that the combat deck is never shuffled. The entire puzzle hinges on inserting each new card to anticipate rival attacks, set up defensive parries, and manage your team’s power curve. That simple mechanical wrinkle fuels an engaging psychological duel and perpetual round-to-round tension, supported by clean, atomic, and rapid-fire resolution. On the flip side, players must climb a slight learning curve to internalize all twelve fighters, and occasional bad draws from the reserve can briefly stifle your tactical freedom. Taken for what it is—a punchy, fast-playing skirmish game—it stands as an agile, clever, and refreshing duel that turns every clash into a compelling game of cat and mouse. For all these reasons, I give it a…