Destroyed But Not Defeated: TAG TEAM review

I read Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea my junior year of high school, at the same time that I was reading The Twin Towers. One of those books was required reading; one of those was for pleasure. I will let you guess which one.

As a fan of sci-fi and fantasy, I had no desire to read a book about an old man, his young protégée, and a fish. I wanted to read books about swords and sorcery, long novels with young people being tapped from unremarkable little villages to do remarkable feats. I wanted a book filled to the absolute brim with strange customs and stranger cultures, not a book about the vast emptiness of the ocean. It wasn’t until I became an adult that the lyrical, athletic prose of Hemingway’s novels became important to me, in ways that I still cannot explain.

I want to revisit Old Man and the Sea this month, but not for the reasons you might suspect. It’s because I’m inspired by Santiago’s fight with the sharks after playing TAG TEAM, the new auto battler from Scorpion Masqué.

Already, I can hear the groans. “You’re comparing one of the greatest novels from American literature to a card game?” Hear me out.

But man is not made for defeat…A man can be destroyed but not defeated. Ernest Hemingway

In Tag Team, a two player fighting card game designed by Gricha German and Corentin Lebrat, players enlist two fighters, smash their decks together, and then flip one card at a time from the deck trying to knock out one of the other player’s characters. The designers included twelve wildly different characters in the box, so there is plenty to explore.

At first, the twist would seem to be the mechanism that German and Lebrat add to these fighting style games where your “deck” starts with only two cards, one from each of the characters, and each round, an additional randomly drawn card gets added to the deck. But that’s not the diabolical twist.

The kicker is that players have almost no control over their deck except for two choices — one, picking one of the three random cards that are dealt to the player during the set up of each new battle round, and two, deciding where in the deck that card will go. What juicy decisions! They are small, but brilliant additions to the game. Do I place an auto attack block at the start of my deck, where I know my opponent played his best attack card? Do I place this healing card early, to give me a boost against his attacks to help me survive the round, or do I let my special cards get busy first and try a last ditch save in the end, assuming I make it that far? Every round brings these tough decisions, reminiscent in my mind of the mini-deck building rounds in Challengers!, but more immediate and with more impact.

In our most recent play session, Mitchell and I battled it out with some distinct characters. I had Joan (of Arc not ARCS fame), a support character, teamed up with Mephisto, a character that wavers between growing and attacking depending on the card play and a token that represents two sides of its signature serpent. I stood my ground for the for a long time, probably the longest match I’ve ever played, but in the end, I lost to Mitchell’s Mordred and The Wild Bunch.

I shouldn’t be surprised at the outcome. I’ve lost to Mitchell two out of the last three times we’ve played TAG TEAM. I need inspiration. Could I get it from Santiago’s fearsome, lonely, forlorn fight with the sharks in the vast ocean? I think I could. Santiago knows that at any moment his beloved marlin could be stripped from him, but he uses his mind, his will, and a fierce determination to overcome adversity alone to battle back. He knows that he may be destroyed in the process — I won’t spoil the ending, but let’s just say it goes very badly for the prize — but he is not defeated.

Isn’t our experience of auto-battling as a mechanic in TAG TEAM similar to the journey that Santiago takes? We cannot control our opponents in TAG TEAM, we can only anticipate their movements and actions and strategy. We cannot control the randomness of the flip of three cards during each round’s prep time, but we can choose wisely based on past experience and our expectations for the future. We cannot predict the outcome, but we sure can stack the deck.

Santiago is the picture of resilience. At the end of the novel, he dreams of lions, a wild but common motif in Hemingway’s writings. At the end of my match with Mitchell, I dreamed of a Snickers bar and a Voltage Mountain Dew, but I don’t sleep on newspapers like Santiago does. Next time I play TAG TEAM, I’ll be sure to pay closer attention to what my opponent is doing. I’ll stare Mitchell down and think hard about the sequence of actions he took in the last round. I’ll pay better attention to what his characters do, what their strengths are as a party, what weaknesses might Mitchell leave under protected, like that one tiny area of Smaug’s underbelly.

I want to dream of lions, too.

Until next time, laissez les bon temps rouler!

— BJ from Board Game Gumbo

** A complimentary copy of the game was provided by the publisher. **