From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Tabletop and TTRPG adaptations
For specific game systems, see Reconstruction Protocol (tabletop game), Cycle Protocol, and individual game articles.
Beach Surgery's structural properties—the unfinishable glitch, eternal recurrence, and Leif's three injuries as load-bearing mechanics—have generated a significant tradition of tabletop and role-playing game adaptations. Unlike narrative media, which must resolve or abandon the glitch, tabletop systems embed it as procedural law: the game loop that never closes, the character advancement that spirals backward, the session that cannot be remembered the same way twice.
Reconstruction Protocol (tabletop game) (2016) models Half One as a negotiated space where players assemble medical supplies across Newcastle while the transition to Half Two remains deliberately withheld. Cycle Protocol (2019–ongoing) rotates Game Master authority; no two loops replay identically, creating systemic drift within repetition. Several systems map Leif's three injuries to mechanical costs: blindness (mystery), immobility (miracle-temptation), cardiac governance (authority)—players expend these as resources per session and never fully recover them.
Frequencies the Spine Cannot Hear (2021) uses binaural audio to parallel doubled vision. The Leather Equation (2018 wargame) counts loops as arithmetic, testing whether Katita's armor contains leather for exactly seven cycles—a hypothesis resolved by play, never by rules.
Most groups report that sessions end mid-climax or reset abruptly. The systems are designed to frustrate completion. This is canonical.