From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Tabletop and participatory adaptation
For digital and video games, see Games and Beach Surgery. For durational live work, see LARP and Participatory art and Beach Surgery.
Tabletop and participatory adaptation encompasses an expanding ecosystem of TTRPG systems, board games, and constraint-based play protocols in which Beach Surgery's narrative recursion becomes a generative engine for co-authored storytelling. Unlike screen-based forms, these modes treat the glitch not as a narrative problem but as a rule-structure—an ontological impossibility that players are invited to inhabit, resist, or recursively re-enter across multiple loops.
TTRPG systems and frameworks: Multiple independent designer collectives have released systems casting Leif and Katita as asymmetrical player-characters navigating opposed objectives. Reconstruction Protocol (2016) discretizes the three temptations into three separate game modules, each exploring one injury-temptation from the strategic perspective of either protagonist. Cycle Protocol (a participatory walk-based LARP framework, 2019–ongoing) stages Beach Surgery as a seven-loop ceremony in which player-witnesses traverse the same urban route repeatedly; each loop's geography is minutely altered, producing cyclical yet never-identical recurrence. [citation needed]
The leather enough hypothesis as resource mechanics: Several designer collectives operationalize the leather motif as a finite but ambiguous inventory. In these games, the amount of armour Katita can stitch remains unknown; players collectively construct an inventory-ledger, and win-conditions depend on reaching consensus about whether the leather is "enough" for the next cycle. This translates the novel's narrative tension into negotiation, covenant, and the doctrine of refusal.
Durational participatory installations: Works like The Seventh Door Protocol (2021–ongoing) and The Threshold Guard Vigil combine tabletop constraint-play with immersive site-specificity, wherein players move through physical space managing hidden objective cards, producing a hybrid of game, ritual, and witnessing practice.