Tragedy Looper (Spoiler Free) First Impressions

Tragedy Looper is a game based on time travel and ‘incidents’.

It hurts your brain.

Tragedy Looper is a scenario-based deduction game for two to four players: one mastermind and one to three protagonists. The game consists of four location boards and a number of character cards. Each scenario features a number of characters, hidden roles for these characters (serial killer, conspiracy theorist, friend), and some pre-set tragedies (murder, suicide).

Tragedy Looper contains scenarios that can be spoilt, I won’t be doing that here, I’ll be as vague as usual I can be.

This is the board, made up of the Hospital, Shrine, City and School

One player is the Mastermind and the rest are Time Travellers. The board is set up according to the Scenario in which each character is assigned a secret role.

We take actions using cards and play through several days. After an amount of days ‘something’ will happen and time will reset. The Mastermind is trying to get this to occur X number of times while the rest of us are trying to prevent it, once.

If it occurs, time ‘Loop’s back, the game resets and we go again with a bit of information.

So How do we stop it? Using cards.

Cards

These are our cards, the Mastermind has a similar set and can play 3 face-down on Characters or Locations. Then we play each play one on characters too. They are revealed and resolved.

The Mastermind will be moving Characters to complete their goal while adding Intrigue and paranoia to try and trigger events. Good Masterminds will also do this to throw the rest of us off the track. We can cancel these effects, move characters and add Goodwill which will trigger character abilities for us.

The cool thing about this is as players we can’t communicate once a ‘Loop’ has started, so while we are working together, we’re doing it silently.

As players, we’re trying to find out the characters’ roles and use the sheet below to work out which Main Plot and Sub Plots are in play.

Once we work this out we can figure out what the mastermind is trying to achieve and do what we need to stop it.

That’s pretty much all I can say without being Scenario specific.

Tragedy Looper Summary

It’s very good as far as deduction games go. It’s more fun than Letters from Whitechapel type game and just plain better than games like Wooolf! and Nosferatu.

As players cannot talk I found it really bad during my turn. A lot of the time, for example, we knew we didn’t want a character to move and if the Mastermind put a card on him I could play ‘Forbid Movement’ to stop them moving… simple.

But a lot of the time I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t want to let my team down. I didn’t want to move someone into danger by accident or allow the Mastermind to get away with an action…

Also, replayability is limited unless you have several different groups, all of which do not own it. Once you’ve played a scenario it kind of gives it away a bit.

But still, a very very good game and one that I’m looking forward to playing again.

Jesta ThaRogue