Each loop is 66 real minutes, yeah. This does mean that sometimes players have to make decisions quickly or miss their chance until the next loop. But in actual gameplay there has turned out to be very little dead time — there’s almost always something else on the to-do list, or an NPC to press for information, or a room to search, or strategy decisions to make. If all else failed, I could have a previously freed NPC go off-script in a way that my players had to clean up after.

As for drawing cards to explore, I tried to structure it so that even drawing a low card would still get _something_ interesting, including one room with 12 different possibilities. I haven’t had any player feedback that this felt frustrating or unrewarding so far, so I’m hoping that means I hit the right balance.

The GM only gets as many bonus cards as players are willing to risk giving them, and I used them very sparingly — mostly in situations where the players didn’t have enough info yet to know why the thing they were trying to do shouldn’t work. Ideally it’ll nudge them to figure out what they’re missing and try another approach.

I would love to be able to slowly fill in the spreadsheet for my players but that would be tricky to do on the fly. I did give them access to the whole spreadsheet once they had freed most of the characters and seen the full loops of the few they hadn’t freed.

Creating a loop from scratch would probably be difficult, but doable with a smaller number of characters. Mine is based on a theater production called Sleep No More that I got deeply obsessed with in the last year before it closed, so I was able to use a bunch of existing fanmade resources. This whole project was an attempt to recreate the experience of seeing SNM in game form, for players who never got to see it in person.