Review: The Loop (Pandasaurus Games)

Oh no! Dr. Faux is trying to take over the universe with his villainous Omniscience 2000 project. But the machine’s instabilities are ripping rifts in the space-time continuum that could cause a vortex — or even a mega vortex!

Only you and your team at the Agency stand between the universe as we know it and total time destruction. Work together to stop him, repair the rifts, destroy his clones, to save today and all of the yesterdays and tomorrows!

That’s the storyline setup for The Loop, a cooperative game for 1-4 players from Pandasaurus Games. So check your chronographs and get ready to dive into the top five things you need to know to prevent Dr. Faux from unraveling time as we know it.

There’s a Lot Happening in Here

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This isn’t your typical run-down-the-clock co-op game. Sure, it has an end game timer like most every co-op game, but that’s just one part of a multi-faceted whole.

The Loop includes five player characters with unique special abilities. From there, it adds elements of deck building, card combinations, and random events. It tops off the mixture with a limited action economy based on energy cubes that players find scattered around the board.

Game turns follow the overall story line. They start with Faux phase, representing the activities of your nemesis, Dr. Faux. Then the current player’s agent does their best to protect the universe by facing down clones, collecting artifacts, and completing missions.

Armed with Artifacts

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Dr. Faux may have his evil machine, but the heroes of The Loop rely on help from their amazing artifacts.

Every agent begins the game with a personal deck of six starting artifacts such as the Double Battle-Monocle, Auto-Disguise Headband, and the Random Punchline Generator. The artifacts help the agent move through time, repair rifts, gain extra resources, and reposition clones.

At the start of each turn, you reveal three cards from your artifact deck. As your agent uses them, you turn the cards sideways to show they’re exhausted. At the end of the turn, you discard all of that turn’s cards whether you used them or not, so it pays to do everything you can.

Fighting the Faux Clones

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As Dr. Faux does his dirty deeds, he leaves clones of himself throughout time. The clones make your life miserable because they increase the number of rift cubes entering the game each turn.

Your agents can defeat the clones by moving them to their own time with artifacts. The game’s graphic design makes this easy to determine since clone tokens carry the color and icon of their paradox era.

Rift Cubes, Vortexes, and Dr. Faux’s Machine

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At the center of game — literally — sits your nefarious time-traveling foe’s evil machine. In reality, the machine is a randomizer tower with an opening at the top and three chutes at the bottom.

Each turn, you draw a Faux card to represent the dastardly doctor’s current plans. You

rotate the machine so the center chute faces the era shown on the card, then you take a number of red rift cubes from supply according to the instructions on the card and drop them into the machine.

The cubes jiggle around inside the tower and randomly fall out of the three chutes onto the game board. Each era on the board can handle three rift cubes, but if a fourth one falls into an era, that triggers a vortex which destroys that era’s mission. If too many vortexes show up, players automatically lose the game.

Defeating Dr. Faux on Your Own

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The game also includes instructions for solitaire play. In this version, you run two to four agents on your own, but you still only count as a single player for things like determining how many clones come into the game on a turn.

During setup, combine the starting artifact cards for all of your selected agents into a single deck. You’ll draw from this deck at the beginning of each turn.

Turns operate much like they do in the regular game with a couple of exceptions, such as only activating one agent each turn. Drawing and discarding artifacts also works differently, but the changes make sense and support the flow of the game.

Verdict

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If you like cooperative games but yearn for something with deeper strategic complexity and a lot more moving parts, The Loop will scratch that itch.

As we said earlier, there’s a lot happening at once in this game. That can feel overwhelming, especially the first time you play. Heck, the game’s 18 setup steps (explained across three illustrated pages of the instructions) are pretty exhausting by themselves.

But if you break the pieces down and invest the time to learn the game’s iconography, it rewards you with a cooperative playing experience unlike anything else we’ve seen. With multiple scenarios and missions combined with the right amount of randomness from the Doctor’s terrible machine, The Loop delivers huge replay possibilities.