Turtle Team-Up turns Magic: The Gathering into a chill co-op game

Turtle Team-Up retools Magic: The Gathering into a cooperative experience where players face the board together instead of trying to beat one another. It leans into the same appeal as cooperative board games like Arkham Horror and Pandemic: the group either wins or loses as a team, which avoids the frustration of one player being repeatedly bested.

Gameplay feels familiar to Magic players: bring out land, tap for mana, and summon creatures. Each turn you reveal a boss from the boss deck and flip event cards that can debuff players, force discards, or summon Foot Clan ninjas to defend the boss. The Turtles share a life total tracked with shell-shaped tokens and pizza-slice counters; bosses have their own life total, and after you defeat one boss the next encounter ramps up by adding more bosses at once.

It’s not brutally difficult. An event once damaged each creature just after we’d played a swarm of robotic mousers, but teamwork carried us through.

turtle team-up, mtg, cooperative game, arkham horror, pandemic, boss deck, event cards, foot clan, pizza-slice, robotic mousers