English folklore, westerns, Arthuriana, fallen far futures…and time travel! That’s it, those are all my favorite genres and I got to play them all at RinCon, Arizona’s best local convention, late in November. I’ve been reviewing everything I ran, and Publishing Goblin’s Zoetrope: Death Didn’t Take is the last one on the list.

Setting and Premise

Zoetrope is a fix-the-timeline RPG that runs off several decks of cards and a willingness to get very loose and silly in your play. We ran a game with three agents from Zoetrope, a timeline-fixing organization from beyond time and space. Their assignment? Make sure a scientist boards a specific subway at a specific time in a futuristic Ultratokyo in the year 2240. That concept, and every character, was generated through card draws and a willingness to just jump in and start doing stuff. Zero prep, no deep thinking about causality, go go go.

There is no specific setting or premise, really, to a Zoetrope game, but there is a deck of cards that provide both. The main deck of big square cards is called the Event Deck, and each card is literally covered in lists and phrases and ideas. You can find an inciting event to kick off the game, a time, a place, names, unexpected twists…it’s the go-to oracle for the GM throughout the game.

Every game of Zoetrope involves a bunch of agents appearing somewhere and somewhen with a clear assignment. There’s no rhyme or reason as to how these particular agents were pulled in for this job, because everyone draws a character card and a handful of other cards. They show up with equipment, a handful of Action cards with specific possible outcomes, and Time cards with all the time-traveling gewgaws.

Tone and Delivery

The game is very much about Bill and Ted style high speed time travel logistics. Zoetrope gives zero shits about interiority, meditations on regret, or any of that other heavy time travel stuff. It’s pure “jump back a bit and fix this one thing, which causes other problems, so jump ahead and find out how it all worked out, oh shit let’s just start over, uh oh there’s now parallel timelines…”

Everything in the game conveys high-energy zaniness. There are zillions of illustrated cards, all hand-drawn and placed in what looks to be hand-drawn frames to make each card type stand out. I definitely get a sense of giddy propulsion throughout the game just from the art.

The typography, though. Oh lordy. It is so aggressively unreadable that my players almost called it quits before getting charmed by the tempo and events of the game. The text is miniscule, outlined in a color, and placed on another color. Unreadable laid out on the table, barely legible in your hand. It’s honestly heartbreaking because everything else about Zoetrope is so strong. Like I said, despite having to literally use our smartphone cameras to zoom in to read text, everyone ended up charmed by the pretzel logic and the silliness.

System

A Zoetrope mission works like this: the GM starts by drawing an Event card and working up an “inciting incident.” This is the structure of the mission, and it involves just a bit of brainstorming to fit the incident, a time and a place together in your head. It’s heavily improvisational, but I think it’s a bit easier and looser than, say, Atma.

The players assemble an outline of a character via a card draw that begets more card draws. The character card itself includes how many of each other kind of card (action, gear, weapon, time) as well as their own special schtick. One character, for example, can trade in two of their gear cards and search the entire gear deck for exactly the right item. Another gets to assign their own card draw values every time they jump back in time. Everyone also gets a pair of Trait cards, each with a title (linguist! historian!) and a small mechanical bonus. It’s all little technical bits and bobs with a light dressing of characterization on top.

As you play, the players are putting down their action, time, or gear cards down in a row next to the Timeline card. This is a series of reminders of what’s come before, but the Timeline gets fucked around with a whole lot in the course of play as well. The limited hand of actions you have are for very specific outcomes. If another player matches your card, you can also unlock team-up effects on each card. Nifty!

You’re not limited to just your action cards in play though. There’s also a multi-function fate deck for everything else you might try and do. If the GM feels like what you’re trying is uncertain or risky, they draw a card and read what it says. That’s it! The fate deck also generates numbers and plus/minus symbols. Another useful multipurpose tool.

The time travel cards have two basic “types” – recur for going back in time, and anchor for setting a point you can recur back to – as well as tons of every other kind of time-travel trick you’ve ever heard of. Sometimes these look like something in the established fiction (your future self leaves you something useful in the past) and sometimes it’s purely mechanical (pick up all the cards in the timeline and add them to your hand to use later).

My favorite mechanical twist of the game is that, even though you arrive armed with freeze rays and laser lassos and bombs and whatever else, you’re not allowed to use your weapons until someone has played a Violence Voucher action. This implies to me that the Zoetrope organization has basically “cleared” the team to do certain things in the past, but that doesn’t include violence unless they specifically clear you for that. There are no guarantees you’ll ever even see a Violence Voucher card though!

There’s also no guarantee you’ll see a Recur card in your initial draws. You might play an entire time travel game and never travel through time.

In our game, exactly this happened. Among three players and probably 7 or 8 starting time cards, nobody had a Recur. As their mission progressed they got increasingly desperate to find some way to start over. Happily there are lots of ways to draw more time, gear and action cards via traits and character abilities. We ended up doing exactly that, with one character using a Time Microwave (?) to draw several time cards, which resulted in a Scene Forward time card being drawn and that meant playing five more cards (a couple of which ended up being more time cards) ahead and backfilling what happened. That, in turn, meant jumping back in time eventually, continuing to play the Scene Forward events, and explaining how they got there. Like I said, it’s all about logic and logistics and outrageous rationales.

Final Thoughts

Zoetrope: Death Didn’t Take comes with eight two-sided copies of a red/yellow X card, one for each player. Red means stop, yellow means proceed with caution. Maybe this is just a nod to modern play safety concerns/culture, but I wonder if they’re included because the creators expect the game to go heavier than the art and text would imply.

The art, text and heavy emphasis on playing around with Bill and Ted logic combined with nearly no affordances for in-depth characterization pushed our game toward absolute gonzo. For that last Sunday morning con slot where everyone’s punchy? Perfect. As a filler on a game night you can’t get a playable quorum? Perfect. Probably even playable by non-roleplayers, honestly, if they have a head for logic puzzles. It’s nice to have some characterization but purely optional.

The game has a supplement, Across Time, that adds even more of everything. More of every deck, more character types, and so on. But the main thing it adds is…magic. Why magic? Honestly I don’t know. But having played the basic box, I honestly cannot imagine wanting to add even more of everything. The basic game has plenty of everything!

To its credit, there are few ways to play Zoetrope “wrong.” Need inspiration for what happens next? Pull an Event card! Not sure if what they’re trying will work? Pull a Fate card! If you fumble handling the Timeline cards, it’s probably okay. That said, this loosey-goosey framework also demands strong improv chops. I’ve got those, but the folks operating under heavy sleep deprivation and a hangover? A bit tougher to feel both inspired and unconstrained by the card play.

Maybe my favorite bit of the design is this: when the GM feels like you’ve played enough, they can just say “yup, that worked!” and say the game is over and everyone wins. In our game, they never did get that scientist on that subway. They did get him to the subway’s destination though, and after three hours of silliness I was able to say “yup, that worked!” Does that make the game pointless? Nah, I don’t think so. All the pattern-completing goodness and surprising synergies of three smart players pulling unexpected plays out of nowhere was a ton of fun.

Highest recommendation for those who don’t take their roleplaying too seriously. And some curiosity as to whether you could take it all a bit more seriously.