This is a series of posts where I play 100 boardgames.
Game: Tales from the Loop – The Board Game
Designer: Rickard Antroia & Martin Takaichi
Year: 2022
Country: Sweden
Publisher: Fria ligan
I’ve previously known the Swedish publisher Fria ligan for their roleplaying games, which have made them perhaps the best single roleplaying publisher in the Nordics. (And maybe beyond the Nordics too.) One of their most atmospheric games is Tales from the Loop in which a group of Swedish kids explore anomalies around the small town island environment where they live in the 80’s. The genre is similar to Stranger Things, but as a Finnish person I love the Nordic details and vibe.
Tales from the Loop: The Board Game is a boardgame version of the same concept, modeling the roleplaying game’s design and approach with great care. It’s a fairly complex game because there are a lot of things to learn so you can explore the islands with your kid. At least in our game, we reverted to roleplaying habits almost immediately, discussing details of the setting and how our characters fit in. Unusually, there’s a separate setting book included in the box, first time I’ve seen such a thing in a boardgame!
The game is structured into days and weeks. On a Monday, the kids start at school, resolving a school card, before they can explore in the evening. There are different story scenarios that you can play, and we chose the recommended starter scenario Bot Amok. It involves robots behaving erratically, prompting the kids to investigate. If Stranger Things leans into horror, the vibe in Tales from the Loop is more influenced by more humanistic strands of scifi. You want to find out more about the strange machine in the forest but you need to be home for dinner, otherwise your mom is going to get mad.
Each player has a bunch of cubes that can be spent to perform actions. In the game’s best and strongest design choice, all players resolve these actions once the school day is over simultaneously, in a beautiful chaos. It’s a cooperative game, and this makes it possible to plan your actions so that you work together. It worked well and organically and gave the game a lot of energy.
The greatest difficulty in our game came from the way win conditions are revealed over time. There are diary cards which reveal story according to the scenario chosen, and at first you don’t know how to win. You can act towards resolving the actions in the visible diary cards, and follow the thread until more cards are revealed, eventually telling you how to win the game. Or I guess that’s how it works in theory.
In our game, our victory came as a surprise to all present. On the day tracker, it looked like we still had some way to go, and while the task being fulfilled was more difficult than before, it didn’t feel that different. I could see that the design was going for an exploratory vibe where you don’t know the full shape of the mystery in the beginning, but now it felt like we didn’t really grasp it until it was over.
Still, there’s a lot to love in this game. Tales from the Loop, both as a roleplaying game and a boardgame, gets a lot of emotional power from the juxtaposition of the everyday and the fantastical. You sneak into forbidden areas to investigate rumors, and then you have to call in a favor and have your parents drive you home because it’s late. I spent my early game resolving a chore card involving a favorite cousin. It grounds the game in something real, making the fantastical more powerful as a result.