The LOOP: a loopy board game through time

The LOOP is a board game released in 2020 and only recently bought to my boyfriend, as part of his board game collection. As neither of us had played the game before, we decided to give the game a try.

The LOOP’s premise is simple. A meanie called Dr. Faux has made a time machine and is planning on using it to become the master of the universe, but in doing so, is somewhat destroying the universe in the process. Of course, we have to stop him and his army of clones, before space-time collapses on us.

The game is weird.

Each player picks a Temporal Agent which has different cards and unique abilities, and their job is to travel through the ages, defeat clones, get rid of the dangerous rifts that Dr. Faux is making with his time machine. To win the game, you need to complete missions, Players start off with 6 basic cards and can earn more as they progress through the game. In the middle of the board, Dr. Faux uses his time machine and goes to a new era to spread more clones and rifts and we have to shut them down by traveling across eras of time.

There’s four main game modes, and we started off with the basic version, so we could get used to the rules. My character had the ability to use a free move to move to any era, while boyfriend’s character had the ability to push clones twice as far. What we needed to do was to push Faux clones into various eras in order to kill them, while also keeping up with clearing rifts. Each turn, we played three cards from our decks (we start with a deck of 6) in order to do actions, most of which was generating energy to move back and forth through eras.

As we moved around, we worked to complete various missions, which mostly involved doing something in the era Dr. Faux was in, like looping while in his era, or surrounding Dr. Faux by being in the two eras adjacent to the boss. We picked up new cards as we completed missions, all of which were better than our starter cards, but still being easy to use.

Eventually, we won by completing four missions, working together as a team.

We enjoyed it so much that we immediately started a new game.

Not before we put all the cards in little card sleeves. Didn’t take too long, and we had the perfect number of sleeves, for the 100 cards that came with The LOOP. Speaking of cards and stuff, the quality of the physical game is pretty good as well. Nice, chunky board, custom pieces for each character and a neat mini dice tower thing for Dr. Faux to drop rifts into. The missions clip in at the edges of the main game board and the Dr. Faux time machine rotated neatly in the middle.

Our second game was equally fun, if a bit more chaotic, as we tried out one of the other game modes. It was chaotic mostly because we accidentally found a way to, ironically, get stuck in a loop. We’d chosen a harder difficulty, with mutated clones which have to be killed twice, and we had the same “complete 4 missions” as the previous game. This match ended pretty fast, since we basically automatically beat one of the four missions using the loop, and made the other missions much easier.

Still, it was a huge amount of fun and I definitely do want to play it again. There’s a couple more game variants that we want to try…