From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Reconstruction Protocol (tabletop game)
Not to be confused with The Reconstruction Chamber (immersive installation, 2019) or the thematic LARP variant The Healing Spiral.
Reconstruction Protocol is a cooperative narrative board game wherein 2–5 players attempt to reconstruct a fragmented story explicitly modelled on Leif and Katita's journey. Players take roles as "Archivists" rebuilding a corrupted record. The board represents six chambers; each contains narrative cards face-down. On each turn, a player draws a card, reads it aloud, and places it on the timeline. Other players vote on whether it fits. If consensus fails, the card enters the "contradiction pile." Once the pile reaches seven cards, the entire board resets—all progress erased, all cards reshuffled, but contradictions remain in play across loops.
The game's singular mechanic: each playthrough has a different winning condition, determined by which contradictions survive. A group might win by resolving all contradictions and assembling a linear narrative; another might discover the "true" ending is to embrace the contradiction and end mid-loop in deliberate incompleteness. Replays are explicitly canonical within the game's fiction.
The final card, drawn only after 90+ minutes, reads: “How many times have we done this.”
A 2022 analysis in The Incompletion Collective argued this is the single most faithful adaptation of the glitch across all media—not by "solving" it, but by making unresolvability the winning condition.