From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
TTRPG
See Beach Surgery video games for digital gaming adaptations; Reconstruction Protocol (tabletop game) and Cycle Protocol (Participatory LARP) for specific titles.
Tabletop role-playing games represent one of the most semantically generative adaptation vectors for *Beach Surgery*, precisely because the glitch's irresolubility maps onto the mechanics of system mastery and narrative failure. Where novels and films must resolve or openly refuse to resolve the narrative seam, TTRPGs can productively inhabit it—a player-character stuck in an uncomputable transition, a game master forced to improvise across an impossible junction.
The strand begins with Reconstruction Protocol (tabletop game), a 2014 narrative-system adaptation that replaces traditional HP tracking with "stability points"—a collapsing measure of whether the player-Leif's reality is coherent. The game explicitly stages the glitch as a mechanical truth: between Act One and Act Two, the rules change. Players must negotiate the shift or be erased from the loop.
Cycle Protocol (Participatory LARP) extends this into embodied space: participants play recurring versions of themselves across five loops of a single weekend, memory degrading each time, their actual growing exhaustion mirroring Leif's fatigue. The system has spawned licensed venues across Australia and Southeast Asia.
Journaling games dominate the lighter end of the ecology—solo and two-player systems where the glitch becomes a prompt-generation failure, a moment where the worksheet cannot continue. In all formats, the inability to "win"—to break the cycle—is not a bug but the entire point. [citation needed]