Tragedy Looper

(Yeah yeah, I know I said I was going to talk about Twilight Struggle next, but I've been working on both of them at the same time and this one is easier for me to write about because...well you'll see.)

Today's game that I'm going to talk about it called Tragedy Looper. The style is anime as fuck so if looking at anime characters on cards and dealing with a japanese-esque style of game bothers you, I suggest you just wait for my next discussion. However, I'll tell you that you're going to miss out on me talking about a great game that I think is probably one of the most unique games I have ever seen...period. Here we go...

Quantum Looper
Ohhhhhhhhh boy....

Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Doctor Sam Beckett stepped into the quanum leap accelerator....and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own and driven by unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Al, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear. And so Doctor Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping that each time his next leap will be the leap home...

Wait...that's not right. Sure we can travel in time, and we're trying to stop bad things from happening to people but I don't remember being in someone else's body, let alone a hologram being around. And I'm pretty sure that I'm not a doctor, although I can't speak for my other two companions. We do manage to travel back in time to help people but -

***TIMELINE ALTERED - LOOP ABORTED - RESET ENTRY POINT - ENTERING TIME SPIRAL***

Majora's Loop
Fuck that moon

Majora's Mask is set in Termina, an alternate version of the usual series setting of Hyrule, where the Skull Kid has stolen Majora's Mask, a powerful ancient artifact. Under its influence, the Skull Kid causes the land's moon to slowly fall towards Termina, where it crashes after three days. The main protagonist Link repeatedly travels back in time to the beginning of the three days to find a way to stop the moon from destroying the world.

You've got to be kidding me! A moon falling on the planet? How the heck are we supposed to stop THAT tragedy?! Wait, none of us is named Link and where the hell is Termina or Hyrule for that matter? And this skull kid has a mask that lets him move the moon?! Maybe he's the one who keeps causing these bad things to happen while we try to stop them. It's felt as if someone has been working against us. We have to find him and stop him before -

***TIMELINE ALTERED - LOOP ABORTED - RESET ENTRY POINT - ENTERING TIME SPIRAL***

Tragedy Looper
Game Description via CoolStuffInc:
What if you could loop back in time to save a Tragedy? Tragedy Looper, a time-loop deduction board game. A Mastermind will unfold a mystery while the Protagonists try to figure out what is going on. As a Protagonist, your goal is to break out of the time loop maze and create a happy future. But you don't know who is who, what is what, and you don't even know how to win! However, you have the ability to travel back in time so you can replay the same script multiple times! As a Mastermind, your goal is to trigger tragedies and feast your eyes upon the misery of your opponents. You have all the information, but you have to win every single loop. And when the Protagonists lose, the taste of victory is so much sweeter!

Tragedy Looper is a game for 2 - 4 players, designed by Bakafire and published by Z-man Games for the US. The players/protagonists have to use deduction in order to solve and stop crimes/tragedies before they happen while the Mastermind is trying to manipulate the game board to cause them to happen. The base game comes with 10 "scripts", two of which are introductory level to show you how the stories will play out and to teach the protagonists how to deduce what roles the npcs are and what is causing the incidents to happen. Each script has a set number of loops that can occur during the game, as well as a series of days that happen in each loop. If the players don't stop the Mastermind during the first loop, they fail and the second loop is initiated, starting the game over from the beginning(They travel back in time).

Script one's setup. Tracking board on the left for: What day in the loop it is, the day that an incident will occur on, what loop you are on, and an extra tracker for player created scripts.

Each script has certain characters start in their starting locations, and the protagonist needs to discern what role each character has in order to help successfully keep any tragedies from happening. The npcs also have abilities that they can use when they accumulate enough "goodwill", which they gain by the protagonists playing cards on the characters to add tokens to them. Really the whole game boils down to the manipulation of characters through the three decks of cards that the good guys have and the deck of cards that the Mastermind has. The Mastermind moves the characters around, has them perform abilities that he controls as the mastermind, and the protagonists try to counter his moves. I can't really describe too much in detail because you need to play the game to see everything come together and if you go too in depth about a script it will ruin the fun of figuring it out for yourself.


One deck of cards that a protagonist has. There are three similar decks for the protagonists


Tokens for the game, from left to right, top to bottom: The day marker, Loop Marker, Incident Marker, extra token for scripts created by players. Paranoia, Intrigue, Goodwill markers

The only downside to this game is that right now its just 10 scripts, but there is an expansion out that has thirty more scripts in Japan. It just needs to be translated and get a publisher to release the english version. Hopefully Z-man will pick it up sometime in the near future.