Tragedy Looper

My Curious Find and Initial Reaction

It's officially been a year since I stumbled upon Tragedy Looper, a game that caught my eye as I was searching for a birthday gift for myself. I was really drawn to the theme of time travel at the time, so the game caught my attention right away. Oooh! It looks like Quantum Leap meets Groundhogs Day, with Clue on the side and a platter of Doctor Who! Also, I had never even heard of it until I saw it on the shelf. The store clerk had also never even heard of the game, so I was forced to look online for reviews (which why would I never do that anyways, right?) and was pleased to see a handful of very favorable reviews. Aside from those, the only thing that really caught my attention was a continuous mention of how difficult the game is to learn, that it has quite a steep learning curve...

Difficult? Ha! How difficult can it really be??

Well...I didn't laugh for long. The grand reviews pulled me more into the thicket of game mystery as I became obsessed with seeing what this game was truly like. As I looked on youtube and other sites, I failed to find a favorable review. They could never show "too much" as it could spoil the game experience, and those that gave "good" examples were very hard to understand. So I finally decided to take a leap of faith. After all, how hard could it really be?

What followed was weeks and months of difficulty. Apart from the 80 pages of rules (over half of which I had no idea what it had explained), my wife and I struggled through each and every game. After our first play through, we had exhausted nearly four hours, and we didn't understand what was going on in the slightest. But I told her, "We have to keep trying. It has to be fun! So many people have liked it...We have to be...uh...playing it wrong." And we were. We knew we were. Each play became a little better. By the time I had played it my sixth time I KNEW it was correct and boy was it fun! It instantly changed from being a game that I soo didn't want to regret, to becoming one of my all time favorite board games, one that really is as close to Clue on steroids a game as I can find.

A plus-side to this story is that now I can teach people with little to no problem. I have a lot of fun teaching this to coworkers, friends... It's fun, exciting, and the gameplay is brilliant. I would say that the rule book is more complicated than the game really is, and this might turn people away. Perhaps I am just very slow (which would not surprise me) at learning a game like this. It was, however, one of the first board games like this that I've had to teach myself, and I wasn't used to that. Now I read rulebooks for games all the time and I understand them loads better.

The Game

Tragedy Looper is a unique experience. One to three players ("protagonists") travel back in time in the hopes of stopping some very bad things from happening, while one person (the "mastermind") is trying to make those bad things happen. The game starts with certain character cards spread out in different locations on the board; this is set up by the person who is playing the mastermind. The protagonists receive a card for the scenario. It will show what bad events are planned to happen on what days (a "round" or "loop" could consist of 3 to 5 or more days). So, for example, it might say that a murder is going to take place on Day 2, and something bad will happen at the hospital on Day 5. The catch is that some of the characters on the board (maybe a student, doctor, reporter, etc...) are behind these events. One might be the cause behind the murder, while another is just a bystander. The protagonists do not know! But the mastermind does.

During each round, the mastermind - followed by the protagonists - will place cards face down on the board. They are then revealed. Cards can do anything from moving a character from one location to the next, spooking a character by giving them paranoia, befriending a character so they gain tokens that unlock certain abilities (some of which might reveal to the protagonists what their role is, be it a murderer, bystander, or anything really). It is important for the protagonists to watch and learn what it is that the mastermind does, because if at the end of the day (once the cards have been revealed and resolved) if any character has reached their limit of paranoia, those are the ones that can cause bad events to happen.

So the protagonists are waiting, waiting for something bad to happen. They know what will go down (or what is planned to go down) on the certain days. They watch for which characters are getting paranoid, and where they are going. If a hospital incident is about to occur and the mastermind moves a character there while they have loaded paranoia, the protagonists could catch on and stop that character. If at the end of the day the event does go down, and certain bad things happen - maybe a key character is killed, or the protagonists themselves die - the mastermind can say that something truly terrible has happened, and the protagonists can lose the loop, or round.

That is not the end of the game, however! The protagonists are able to "loop" back to the beginning. The game is reset, characters moved back, tokens removed. Now the protagonists learned something, and they continue. Each scenario shows the number of loops that they are allowed before they lose permanently, so they must win before those are gone.

If the protagonists can stop certain events from happening through one "loop" (making it to the end of the last day), then they win.

Final Thoughts

I really love this game. I now find it very easy to teach people. For those I have taught, I've never seen anyone disappointed. Lots of fun right here!