Tales from the Loop – The Board Game | Board Game Review

The renowned work of Simon Stålenhag was brought to life once again, this time in a game board. The art work of “The ‘80s that never was” was turned into an art book in 2014 and has inspired a few things including a tabletop RPG and TV show of the same name since then. In 2016 Simon also had Things from the Flood which continued the ideas from the Loop. The board game designed by Martin Takaichi with Free League, brings a different style of play to the series. Let us take a step back in time and see a place we didn’t know we couldn’t live without.

The Loop

Tales from the Loop already has a huge story and if you’ve seen any of the work already done, then you know the who, what, where, and whys of most of it so I’ll keep it as brief as I can. It takes place in Sweden in the 1980s after a giant particle accelerator was finished underground, and people called that area The Loop. Strange things started to happen all over the countryside. You and four friends, if you have that many, take on the roles of high school kids bent on solving the mysteries befallen their homes. Walk, take the bus, ask your parents for a ride, and take over giant robots to explore the map and complete scenarios to progress the story.

The game has four scenarios to play through, each with their own sets of challenges. Usually board games have a definite goal or condition to win; this game however lets you uncover these conditions as you’re playing, adding to the mystery and suspense. Rumor cards help point you in the right directions to complete objectives to uncover the secrets of the current scenario. Trying to complete these objectives while juggling home life is never an easy task, reinforcing the use of teamwork to make it through each day and ultimately the scenario.

More Than One Iron Giant

Every good game needs some form of negative effect to slow down or stop the player. What is the point in playing a game without any challenge? As if parents and a feeling of impending doom wasn’t enough, robots roam the countryside that could completely ruin your day. There are a few types of robots each with separate strengths and abilities. I would call them enemies, but they aren’t exactly after you just kind of in the way. When encountered, these robots force you to do a type of skill check or face consequences such as less actions per turn or an inability to help friends. Not all is bad though, as given enough time the team of kids can hack into one of these robots and use them to move around the map to better complete objectives or just to make it home in time. Getting back home at a decent time can be a pain, however it can be very useful to the party as a whole by allowing you to remove negative effects from your character. Being home at night or the end of your turn also keeps your parents happy and you from being grounded. In Tales from the Loop, the more you can move around the map the better. 

While dealing with all that, remember that these are still kids in school and have random happenings there too. These happenings could slow down just the starting player or the party as a whole depending on the challenge and if it was a success or failure. Each character has their own strengths and weaknesses that determine how well they handle the situations they get into. Other players can help if they are allowed, but only if they have a strength matching the challenge. In this way the game keeps its RPG ideals following in the steps of other games that start with “D” and ends with “and dragons.” In this idea, the action phase or movement phase allows one or all players to move and act as they see fit at the same time. An idea not expressly explained in game, but there weren’t many ways to explain how some things worked unless all players could in fact move together. 

Tales from the Loop RPG for Dummies

Tales from the Loop is not exactly an original game. Many elements have been taken from the preexisting RPG. I feel like they wanted a game that was easier to flow while playing, rather than rely on a game master to tell a story. Trying to fill up different cards to point the players where they need to go might have been a good idea on paper, but seems to have fallen short here. Opening the game with no context can be overwhelming at first, being met with over 200 cards and so many tokens. After a few hours we got everything set up and thought we had a decent understanding of the game. After a few more hours came the conclusion that not everything was as cut and dry as we had hoped. Maybe it was just us, maybe it was the game. Who knows.

If you read about or even played the RPG version of this, you might know that it was a balancing act between allowing the players to explore a new and very different world as children and putting them in the right place for story related happenings. The board game takes the adventure out of it and lets the cards direct the players to the next steps. The story itself seems to be lost in the task-driven card game this became. Instead of finding a clue or the missing link, you find a task allowing you to continue on to the next task if you were able to complete the first one.

Another thing that struck me as odd about this version is the fact that they splurged on minis for the robots but not the player characters. I feel like this pulls attention away from the player characters. While not a huge issue it seems that the board game drops the specifics of story and character development and focuses on the game itself. I don’t buy Monopoly for lore, but if I buy Tales from the Loop: The Board Game I would expect more Loop than game.

The Good, The Bad, and the Board Game

With all that being said, if you and your friends have 4 to 5 hours to sit down, set up, learn, and play, you could have a good time with it. I suggest reading all the rules and watching a few videos before playing. Simon Stålenhag’s work continues to inspire new and interesting ideas of worlds and places we might only be able to see in a dream. While some of these ideas are hit-and-misses, Tales from the Loop will leave you longing for a time that wasn’t and living in a place that isn’t.

P.S.  Simon Stålenhag did the box art for No Man’s Sky! 

 

This review is based on a tabletop copy of Tales from the Loop – The Board Game provided by Fria Ligan for coverage purposes.