Debrief: Tag Team from Scorpion Masqué

A duel that teaches itself, bites fast, and still makes you sweat—Tag Team brings auto-battler energy to the tabletop without the bloat. We break down how two fighters per side, a locked deck order, and a single placement choice each round can produce real drama in under fifteen minutes. With 12 asymmetric fighters—tanks that soak, glass cannons that spike, and a rage-fueled shapeshifter chasing a late-game flip—the game rewards timing, foresight, and a little nerve.

We walk through the core loop step by step, then dig into the mind games: when to slot a clutch block on top, when to hide a heal mid-sequence, and how overcommitting to one star creates both control and a target on their back. Clear iconography and plain-text effects keep new players comfortable, while the partial-information dance keeps veterans guessing. We also explore the broader rise of auto battlers from apps like Super Auto Pets to tabletop hits like Challengers, and why Tag Team hits a sweet spot of simplicity and agency where many designs stumble.

If you’re balancing family schedules, late nights, or tight game windows, this one punches above its weight: quick to teach, quick to finish, and easy to replay with new pairings. We share where it shines, where it might feel too brisk, and a few light tweaks you can try if you want longer arcs. Ready to find out if “almost plays itself” can still feel strategic? Press play, then tell us your favorite fighter combo and whether you’re Team Speed or Team Depth. If you enjoyed the breakdown, follow the show, leave a rating, and share this with a friend who loves tight two-player games.

Chapters

• 0:15 Setting The Stage: Tag Team
• 0:46 Auto Battlers In Board Games
• 1:08 Publisher And Two-Player Context
• 1:48 How The Core Loop Works
• 2:34 Asymmetric Fighters And Roles
• 3:16 Deck Building By Placement
• 4:15 Teaching, Pace, And Accessibility
• 5:30 Power Cubes And Damage Flow
• 6:13 Strategy And Partner Synergy
• 7:28 Decision Space And Critique
• 8:39 The Bear Transform Dilemma
• 10:07 Targeting Pressure And Risk
• 10:51 Order Control And Hidden Info
• 11:04 Flash Duel Comparison
• 12:08 Why Quick Games Fit Our Lives
• 12:45 Auto Battlers’ Rise From Apps
• 14:08 BGA Play And Real-Time Fit
• 16:10 Closing Thoughts And Sign-Off

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:15

Welcome to the Operation Game Night Podcast. Today we are going to tag team a debrief. Today we're talking tag team.

unknown: 0:23

Wow.

SPEAKER_01: 0:23

With my good friends, Clayton and Jared. How you doing, boys?

SPEAKER_00: 0:27

I'm doing great. I'm doing great, Travis. Um, are we really gonna tag team this? You gonna help me out here?

SPEAKER_01: 0:33

I can help a little bit. I played this one on board game arena. I know it's like an auto card battler where the like position of your cards matter.

SPEAKER_00: 0:42

Yes. So auto battlers are all the rage these days. I challengers was a big hit. We've got you know, flip tunes is almost like an auto-battle y type. Well, it's not battle in any sort of way, but point generating. Yeah, like these games are getting popular, and I can see why I personally like oh hot streak too. Yep, the race game. You know, you make the deck, and then you pretty much just sit back and watch what happens, and that's what's going on here in tag team. Uh, it's Scorpion, you said Scorpion Masque, and they just did the one two-player game that we love. Sky Team. Sky Team. That's right.

SPEAKER_01: 1:24

I also did the Dead Cells board game, which is also on board game arena. Oh dang.

SPEAKER_00: 1:30

But this is another entry into the two-player banger genre. The I mean, Sky Team was a mega hit for them, and tag team has been similarly receiving wide praise. So they've got something going on here in the in the two-player realm. So in tag team, you're essentially forming two separate tag teams of fighters that are just trying to knock each other out. So each person is gonna have two fighters in front of them. You have a deck of cards for each of these fighters, and at the start of the game, you will have one card for each fighter, the starting card, and that makes up your deck. The only decision is which one do you want on top or bottom? Yep. And then so both players make their two starting cards, put them out, and then this is the auto battle part. You just flip over the card, and then you resolve the effects. So a lot of the effects are you know, attacks and defenses, and there's um a lot of special abilities. So in the box, there's 12 different fighters, and each fighter has asymmetric abilities, you know. Think like Root, all right, playing the uh River folks a lot different than playing your uh Marquita Cat. And so, you know, there's guys in there that are tanks, like can take a ton of damage, and there's a guy in there that um his name's like Bodvar, and he has a double-sided board, and his whole goal is to get up on the rage track far enough so that he flips over and turns into this bear that now has a ton of power and pretty much can one hit kill anybody. So that's the game. After you play both your cards, then you have your shuffled deck of all the other cards combined for both your tag teamers, and then you draw three off the top, and you pick which one you want to add to your little two-card pile. And you pick that card, and it's very important. You cannot change the order of the cards that were already in your deck. Yeah, you have to place that new card into the deck. You can go in between some of the cards, you can go on top, on bottom, and that's the real strategy and thinking of the game is making that one decision. Because when your opponent has a big attack lined up and you have a defense card, you obviously want to try to line up your defense card so that when you auto-reveal, you're gonna block that attack and then maybe do damage back to them instead. Yeah. Um I really enjoy this game. Uh as because it starts out so simple. Like that first round, you can kind of get away with not doing much of a rules teach. Yeah. Uh, because this game's so fast. Like you can honestly get through a game of this in like 10-15 minutes. So if you're playing this with someone new, you just deal out a couple characters, you kind of explain what their character does, give them their two starting cards and be like, okay, this is how a round works. Flip over your top card. All right, look, I attacked, and I attacked that person, you attacked, you attacked this person, and then you flip the next one. And then they're like, oh, okay, I see how this is. And then they get a chance to draw their cards, and they're like, Oh, okay, I see what this does. And the nice thing about the cards and tag team is they have the iconography, you know, attacks are a nice little red starburst, and defense is a shield, but each card on the bottom has like the full text of exactly what that card does. So it is not confusing hardly at all. If you know like the core terms of the game, like attack, defend, or maybe it's called block. Attack, defend if you know who your partner is, if you know who your opponent is. There's like four things that you need to know, and then pretty much reading the card is gonna explain everything for you. Uh there's power cubes, and so in a general attack, you're gonna deal damage. So if we flip over cards, my cards for you know, the bear guy, the other person's cards for uh a certain person. Those two people are the combatants for that moment in time, and so if I can deal damage, I'm dealing damage to that opponent that they also flipped over. I deal damage equal to the amount of power cubes I have. So if I had three purple cubes, I would deal three damage to them. It's just you know, it's dead simple in that way, but just the way the different character asymmetries interact makes it super cool. And you know, like trying to work your characters together, because some are you know like heavy hitters, they got a lot of attacks in there, but they can't take a lot of hits. So you hope your tag team partner has some things that allow them to heal your partner involved too, and you're just trying to balance that what card do I add to my deck, where do I add it to my deck to make sure I can you know prepare myself for this round? Because I've seen Travis's three cards, I know what's coming. Uh I don't know what he just added, but I know if he hits me with that one attack again, I'm KO'd, it's over. So that's generally like the gist of tag team. I've played it like four times now, maybe with six different characters. None of them are too complicated. It comes with a whole like fighter guide separate that explains each character's special abilities, and some of them are literally like three sentences long, so it's like you have to straightforward. Yeah, it's pretty straightforward a lot of them. Uh so I I enjoyed this. Travis, you played it on board game arena. I never recommend doing these things on games you don't know.

SPEAKER_01: 7:24

Well, I'm I feel like this one's simplified enough, and the decision that you're making is like which of my cards am I playing in which order? And so yeah, the decision space is so limited that it really like it's a game that kind of plays itself. And I, you know, some of these auto battlers can get so like fluffy and have so many they try and build in more decisions and more complexity to them that it just becomes so bloated and like just not fun. So, where does this fall in that kind of scale here? Like, do you feel like it's so limited that it's it's a game that plays itself, or do you feel like they've added just the right amount of decision space to allow you to manipulate your hand or uh manipulate the the card space, I guess?

SPEAKER_00: 8:12

Hmm, that's a good question. I would say it's probably closer to the the sweet spot than um if anything, it errs on the side of uh almost too auto-battily with little decisions, but yeah, it's certainly not at the point where it's you know overly bloated with things to consider. I mean, you literally make one decision each round and it relatively matters. If I had to levy any criticism against it, it's like uh almost too fast. Like I've played four games. 10 minutes playing time, yeah. Yeah, which is nice, but it almost feels like you don't even get a chance to see some of the build. Like I've played with this bear guy like four times now, and his whole thing is getting to flip over to be the bear, and I've never seen it go long enough that he can flip, you know. Um, because he has one card that all it does is like move up his rage track, and that has to happen like seven times for him to flip over. Wow. So if you don't go through seven rounds and somebody dies before then, it you usually it's him that dies. Um he takes a lot of hate. Yeah, because the other tension is the more times you have a single character's card added to your deck. So like when I draw my three cards, I might have two cards for the bear guy, one card for the kung fu guy. Yeah, and if I keep adding bear cards, it's great, but also every time that's the person getting targeted by my opponent. So he's gonna be taking a lot of heat, and all you need is one of your people to get knocked out for you to lose. Um it does happen quick.

SPEAKER_02: 10:04

I do have one question just to help me understand real quick. So then you get to decide what uh order the auto draw comes out, the action deck. Yeah so like it's not like a randomized, like you can very tightly because you said you can put it on top, bottom, yeah, somewhere in between. So it's not like you're you can also change that order in between rounds, so you can like no, the order has to stay the same.

SPEAKER_00: 10:30

The order of the cards that were already in your deck stays the same, but when you add a new card, that's where that's where you can place it somewhere. So if you get a if one of your guys is like really struggling and you and you drew a healing card, you can put that sucker right on the top of your deck to make sure they get healed up at the start of the round, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 10:51

So but then your opponent knows your order, just doesn't know where that extra card is going. Yeah. Okay. Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 11:00

This are you familiar with the game Flash Duel? No. So this kind of reminds me of Flash Duel. Uh, Flash Duel is like this game turned into like a fencing match, and you play on this kind of linear track, two-player only, and you have two players that are trying to push each other off the end of the map off the end of the play field, right? It's maybe 10 spaces long or whatever. You kind of start in the middle, maybe two or three spaces away, and you play cards against each other, like 1v1 card, and it's either like progress or egress, and you can do damage to each other, and you're kind of like fencing each other back and forth. And while this does not have like any sort of spatial manipulation, like a play field, uh, it kind of reminds me of that similar style where it's like a boiled down version of like game theory. I know that they want to attack me because I'm weak, but they know that I know that they want me to attack them. Like, and you kind of do this like mental shuffle, like mental gymnastics in your head to try and outsmart the other player and and and come up with those surprising turns. Um, but yeah, I I can see the appeal of this one because it is so simple and plays so quickly. Uh, this has a space on our tables right now with how we live our lives.

SPEAKER_00: 12:19

So yeah, I'm glad that 10-minute game is good for us.

SPEAKER_01: 12:22

Yeah, that's great, man. Uh, especially with two players, put the kids down, pull this out. Let's play some characters we haven't played before. Like it's got a little bit of replayability. The decision space is small enough where it's not going to eat up your your brain after like a taxing day. So, yeah, I'm glad Scorpion Mass designs games like this at this level of simplicity. Um, those auto battlers have become really popular lately. And I wonder how much of that is from like super auto pets. I don't know if you guys remember that. That was an app maybe three, four years ago that like just took off. And super auto pets is like this auto battler phone game where you're drafting these different pets of different like species. You've got your turtles and your cats and your dogs and your birds and your snakes and whatever, and how you uh how you arrange them in order, you come up against enemies, and depending on how you have them like stacked up in a line, they will do different things. And so those types of auto-battlers, like I felt like that was like peak video game auto battler, and then I kind of trickled down into the board game sphere. Uh, you know, me and Mike, we played uh Spirited on board game arena. The game's probably good. I did not enjoy its implementation on board game arena, and I kind of messaged Mike and I was like, are you guys understanding this? Like, what or are you understanding this? Like, what is actually going on? We decided to like concede the game and drop it because it just maybe we just were unprepared to play it. But yeah, that they are uh becoming a prolific type of uh genre in the board game community right now, especially card games like this.

SPEAKER_00: 14:04

I'm all for it. I like just kicking back and seeing what happens, you know. I you make a couple decisions and then you just get to watch it unfold. And this has made me this in hot streak. I I scoffed at challengers early on. Um, and now I'm thinking I gotta get challengers. Uh that game sounds like a freaking hoot. Yeah. Yeah, that's all I got on tag team.

SPEAKER_02: 14:30

Uh have you played with uh played Brooks on this one? I know you got family in town for the holidays.

SPEAKER_00: 14:37

No, he literally just got here this morning, so I have not played with him. I've played with my neighbor a couple times. I've played with Isaac, and I played with Mary.

SPEAKER_01: 14:46

So I've got what did Mary think about this one?

SPEAKER_00: 14:49

She did not. This looks like a game she would not want to play. And she said as much when I asked her to play it with me. She's like, I don't want to play that. I said, Well, Mary, this is basically just like I declare war. You don't even have to make any decisions. And then she played it and she said, That wasn't so bad. So that is a rave review.

SPEAKER_01: 15:15

Scorpion Mask, put it on the box. That's your box quote. It wasn't so bad. Oh gosh. No, yeah. Scorpion Mask is doing some cool, kind of different stuff right now, and I really enjoy their design, so I might have to check this out.

SPEAKER_00: 15:30

Yeah, I think it would be much better in person just because it's so quick and snappy, and you can stay engaged with knowing where people's cards are. I I don't know if you played it real time or turn-based, but that would be a disaster to play turn-based on board game arena.

SPEAKER_01: 15:46

No, I played real time. I had a couple minutes, sat down. It said it said it played quickly, and yeah, sure enough, we were done in probably less than 10 minutes. So yeah, uh, probably because I was new and got my butt handed to me. But yeah, it's a cool design. I I think I'll check out more of it if you have a couple minutes to to kill while you're standing in line or waiting in the doctor's office or something, just pull this up on BGA and run a couple. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks for debriefing tag team. You're welcome. Did we do it? I think we did it. We done this has been Operation Game Night Podcast. I have been Travis, he has been Clay, he has been Jared, and we're out.