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While the original game was intended for four players only, with three players competing against a single mastermind (or scriptwriter, in the original game), the Z-Man Games edition scheduled to debut at Gen Con 2014 in August includes rules for 2-4 players, with the only change to gameplay being how many cards each player lays down during a turn. This change might make more sense to you after seeing how to play the game:
And for those who prefer text to video, here's the description from the BGG game page:
Quote:
Tragedy Looper is a scenario-based deduction game for four players: one scriptwriter and three detectives. 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, misinformant, murderer), and some pre-set tragedies (murder, suicide).
Each "day" (turn), players and the scriptwriter play three face-down cards onto the characters, then reveal them to move the characters around or affect their paranoia or good will stats. At the end of each day (turn), if the scenario has a tragedy set for that day, it happens if the conditions are met, i.e., certain characters have certain stats or are in a certain location together (or not together) with others. As tragedies happen, players loop back in time, restarting the scenario from the beginning and trying to deduce who the culprit was and why along with all of the other hidden rules for the scenario.
The players win if they manage to maintain status quo — that is, if no tragedies related to certain individuals occur — for a set number of days, within a set number of loops. If not, the scriptwriter wins.
I'm not sure how many scenarios are in the BakaFire Party version of Tragedy Looper, but the Z-Man version will have twelve, with 1-2 introductory scenarios. Z-Man's Zev Shlasinger played mastermind against me and two others, and we didn't have a chance, figuring out almost nothing over the course of the game.Each "day" (turn), players and the scriptwriter play three face-down cards onto the characters, then reveal them to move the characters around or affect their paranoia or good will stats. At the end of each day (turn), if the scenario has a tragedy set for that day, it happens if the conditions are met, i.e., certain characters have certain stats or are in a certain location together (or not together) with others. As tragedies happen, players loop back in time, restarting the scenario from the beginning and trying to deduce who the culprit was and why along with all of the other hidden rules for the scenario.
The players win if they manage to maintain status quo — that is, if no tragedies related to certain individuals occur — for a set number of days, within a set number of loops. If not, the scriptwriter wins.
This introductory scenario consists of three loops, with each loop lasting four days — but only if no one dies during that time. If someone does die, whether character or player, then the loop closes and you reboot. Zev managed to engineer a death in the first day of the first loop, giving us a hint of which plot and subplot we might be dealing with, but we failed to stop a death at the start of the second day, too! Thus we had little time to spare on day three, but we went ahead and spared it anyway, costing us the game.
Comparing Tragedy Looper to Time Stories, which I've previewed twice on BGGN, Time Stories is fully co-operative (at least in the scenarios I've played) and is much more about role-playing in a choose-your-own-adventure style of gameplay whereas Tragedy Looper pits one player against everyone else, with each group trying to bluff what they're trying to do — and deduce what the other party is trying to do — in order to manipulate the characters and make history come out the way you want it to. It took our group three plays of TS before we even came close to figuring out the mystery hiding within the scenario, so it's no surprise we were doomed in our first play of Tragedy Looper. After all, the mastermind knows what's supposed to happen, and on top of that, he's played the game before, so he has a better sense of what novice players will do and how to outguess them with his actions. That's my best shot at an explanation anyway — perhaps we're all just terrible players!
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