Review: Tales From The Loop

The art of Simon Stålenhag has already spawned a hit role-playing game and TV show, so Tales from the Loop: The Board Game feels something of an inevitability.

Players take the role of kids in an alternative sci-fi 80s, working together to uncover a mystery while juggling schoolwork and chores. You get six actions per turn to split between a variety of ways to move around and investigate rumours. But try to keep one spare to make it home each day if you want to stay in favour with your parents.

Aside from a standard dice-based resolution system with help and item bonuses to overcome problems, the game has a clever tweak to help it stand out. You pick a scenario, which only reveals a single diary card to start things off. The layers of the mystery must be unpicked one by one before you even know the final victory condition. And of course, there are plenty of ways to lose along the way.

While this works well, giving players a real sense of digging through the layers of a puzzle, one clue at a time, it does limit replay value. The game includes seven and there are a couple of cheap scenario expansions. Some players may find the lack of a clear goal at the start frustrating, but the payoff is impressive.

As each layer is uncovered it combines with the schoolwork and chore cards to create an engaging and varied narrative. To find this out, however, you’ll need to decipher the atrocious rulebook. It’s not so much that things aren’t well explained as the fact that details of the game seem to be missing. You can piece it together from player aids and common sense, but this is simply not something a game should have to ask of its players.

In addition, some of the mechanics that are laid out feel very clunky. Movement uses a combined grid overlaid onto a point to point system, which is innovative and creates interesting strategies but is hard to parse in practice. The robot antagonists have a fiddly reaction and hacking system that means digging in the box to locate and flip behaviour cards depending on environmental factors.

Once you’re past that and into the meat of planning and executing your turn, the game becomes much more engaging. There’s a constant tension between the demands of your humdrum school-kid life and mystery-solving. You must also balance the known scenario goals with investigating rumours. These add to the narrative and there’s a fun risk mechanic where you can either jump in blindly or use an action to scout the rumour first, so you know more about what you’re up against.

Despite its successes and the good service it provides to franchise fans, the game feels underdeveloped as a whole. A better rulebook would improve things, but a lower administrative overhead is likely too much to ask. As it is, too often Tales from the Loop feels like a throwback to the board games of the eighties, and not always in a good way.

Published by Free League

This feature originally appeared in Wyrd Science Vol.1, Issue 3 (Oct '22)