Unintentionally Unwinnable / Non Video Game

Board Games

• Chess:
  • A "stalemate" occurs when the player to move has no valid options, but is not in check. In contemporary chess, a stalemated game is a draw, although in some tournaments a draw is worth points in the overall tournament, encouraging a player who cannot win to at least force a draw. Historically there was no standard rule, and stalemate was sometimes considered a loss for the stalemated player — or sometimes a win (like in Chinese Chess).
  • There's an explicit rule that the game is drawn if no possible sequence of moves from the current position can lead to a win. The most obvious example is when both players have only their king left (or king and knight versus lone king, or king and bishop versus lone king), but there are other possibilities, such as the 16 pawns forming a complete blockade, that are covered by the rule even though they will never arise in realistic play.
  • Another specific case is the "threefold repetition" rule, whereby a game is drawn if an identical position (with the same player to move) occurs three times in the same game, implying that no progress is being made.
  • The game is declared a draw if 50 consecutive moves are made without either player advancing a pawn or capturing a piece. The idea is to be a fallback for more complicated loops or other scenarios where forcing a proper end is impossible — there are positions which can be won but require more than 50 moves, but enough of them that after briefly trying to catalogue them all as exceptions, the chess federations gave up and just decided to ignore them entirely.
  • Underpromotion can create unwinnable states. If a player underpromotes to a knight or a bishop in a king and pawn vs. king endgame, at which point promoting to a queen would have been practically an Instant-Win Condition (unless you mess up the sequence and accidentally stalemate instead), the game is immediately unwinnable, ending in a draw, because there are no possible moves to checkmate the king. Since the game ends immediately, this overlaps with Press X to Die.
  • For that matter, if one really wants to, there is technically nothing stopping a player from deliberately sacrificing all of their pieces for no advantage, though the opponent may well Rage Quit over one's obvious contemptuosity.
  • Loss by timeout in chess is considered a version of this. The player who loses on time is assumed to be making the worst possible moves that lead to defeat, even if they have a full board of pieces against a single remaining opponent's pawn.
• Clank A Deck Building Adventure: In the Catacombs version, the dungeon is built by adding random tiles. Some cards rotate tiles to mix up the map up unexpectedly. It's possible to get trapped or to trap others through this mechanic.
• Empire Builder has the potential to create this for one or more players and make things very annoying for the others. If a player is very low on cash, a natural disaster like a flood can destroy enough of their railroad that they can't afford to repair it and are cutoff from any city where they could make more money. As a last resort they discard their contract cards and draw a new set of contract cards hoping to get one that will get them the money to proceed. However, this increases the chance that another disaster card will be drawn which only makes things worse. They have legal actions in the game but those actions get them nowhere. The other players now have to deal with the possibility of a natural disaster card every other round instead of every five to six rounds. Also, having one player sit around for another hour or two locked in an unwinnable situation is not a pleasant experience for anyone. Since lending other players money is not allowed, the others players will find a way to pay the stuck player rent money for using their railroad just to get them back into the game.
• In the board game HeroQuest, it is entirely possible to lock the game into an unwinnable state by making either the Elf or the Wizard use the spell "Pass Through Rock" then passing through one of the many boulders that are used specifically to stop you from going to rooms to have no way in and nothing of interest thus trapping you on one side of the board with no way out.
  • An Obvious Rule Patch changed it so that if you "Pass Through Rock" and end your turn in one of the empty rooms or hallways, you are considered to have ended your turn inside solid rock, and died messily.
  • In some HeroQuest games, the rules state that the players can only search once in a given room. This can lead to some of the quests becoming unwinnable.
• Betrayal at House on the Hill (and other versions of the game like Betrayal At Baldur's gate) have huge numbers of end game scenarios called Haunts that are randomly chosen based on when and where the Haunt was triggered. However, due to the random nature of the game, it's possible to end up in a situation where one side literally cannot win. For instance, the Traitor becomes a monster and the other players need to find a specific item to beat them... but the traitor happened to find that item and was carrying it when the Haunt started, leaving the heroes with no way to retrieve it. This is made even worse by the fact that some scenarios as originally published have conflicting or unclear rules that could also render a scenario Unwinnable. Fortunately the games are not generally very competitive, so in most situations players can either come to a consensus on how to deal with the rules issues or veto the haunt in favor of something more fun (something that the later edition rules books explicitly suggest to avoid things like repeating Haunts). The game ended up getting a 20-page errata book to correct the worst of the errors, and some are still there.
• The board game Dragons Gold normally revolves around players negotiating over which items each will take from a dragon's hoard. However, the game features an alternative mode where the loot is divided according to fixed rules. In this variant, if all a player's forces are committed to taking down a dragon whose hoard contains a cursed item (although possibly a large amount of treasure as well) but due to interference from other players cannot beat the dragon, the player is effectively out of the game. Without any soldiers they cannot attack other dragons, nor can they pull back their existing ones. Normally, they could ask another player for help, but under the fixed rules for loot distribution it is impossible for them to promise that player that they will not end up with the cursed item, meaning that no player will accept their offer.
• In 7 Wonders games with more than three players, it's possible for an inattentive player to find themselves in the third round with no access to certain materials (especially the gray cards of glass, textiles, and paper, which are relatively rare but factor into a lot of building costs) and no way to get them, since materials stop appearing after round two. Since these are necessary to build a large percentage of the other cards, and the cards in the third round usually contribute more to players' scores, players in this scenario will find themselves locked out of building some of the most valuable things in the game and without many alternatives to make up the difference.
• In Star of Africa, it was possible to get permanently stuck on an island because of the cost of travelling by sea and the possibility of getting robbed or finding the titular diamond on one of the islands. After 50 years of unwinnable games and player-made workarounds, the sea travel was patched to resolve the formerly unwinnable situations by making sea travel free if the player has no money — but only 2 spaces at a time.

Card Games

Magic: The Gathering

• There are many indefinite loops possible in this game. The rule is that if the game ends up in an unstoppable loop, then it ends in a draw; the most common of these involves Animate Dead and Worldgorger Dragon. If it is stoppable, then the players simply decide how many times the loop occurs.
  • The usual trick with Animate Dead and Worldgorger Dragon is to combine it with another effect which can take place while one of the infinite looping abilities is on the stack, usually Bazaar of Baghdad to fill up the graveyard so Animate Dead can get a 20/20 with haste and flying or something similar.
  • The rules have on occasion been changed (used as a tournament rule when a draw is not an option) so that an unbreakable loop counts as a loss for the player who created it.
  • Magic has a bunch of cards with the Nightmare creature type. The most (in)famous of these is called Faceless Butcher. When it comes into play, it removes a creature from the game other than itself. When it leaves play, the removed creature comes back. So, to draw the game, make sure there are no creatures in play. You need three Butchers (let's call them A, B and C.) Play Butcher A. Nothing happens since there are no legal targets for his first ability. Play Butcher B. B has a legal target: A. Remove A from the game. Play Butcher C. Butcher C has a legal target: Butcher B. Now B has left play, so the second ability triggers and resolves: Return the removed creature to play. The removed creature was Butcher A. A comes into play and has a legal target for its ability: C. Remove C from the game, which bring back B, which removes A... unless someone can either counter one of the abilities (only two or so cards in the entirety of the card pool targets triggered abilities) or can kill one of the butchers before the abilities happen, you've created an infinite loop and the game is a draw.
  • The Lorwyn/Shadowmoor blocks had several creatures with the Champion ability, which removes a creature you control from the game, often with restrictions on the sort of creature it can target. This can be used to create loops.
  • Also note that such loops can lead to a game-ending condition if combined with other cards like Pandemonium.
  • These days in Magic, the O-Ring Lock is better known than Faceless Butcher, with three of Oblivion Ring. Works exactly the same way, though, so if there are no other non-land permanents, you've just locked the game.
    • Someone got the situation semi-deliberately in an actual game in MtG Online. The server was not programmed to handle the situation and it kept crashing and restoring the game up to that point in a loop... ("Semi-deliberately" meaning that the situation came naturally in an actual game, and the player saw it coming and could have avoided it, but decided to cause the loop just to see what would happen.)
  • Play a Stuffy Doll, but target yourself with its damage-sharing ability instead of an opponent. Then enchant it with Pariah, which bounces damage off of you and back on to the Doll. Then tap it to deal one damage to itself. You now have one damage being passed around an infinite number of times. If they disenchant the Pariah, you take 1 from Stuffy and that's it. (The actual process is. Stuffy deals 1 damage to itself, that ability resolves (stack is empty at this point), then Stuffy's ability is triggered, dealing 1 damage to you. Then when it begins resolving, Pariah redirects the damage to itself. Then it triggers again.) The only time to interrupt this loop is when the 1 damage goes on the stack, in which then pariah is no longer around when the 1 damage resolves, so it will be dealt to you.
    • If you have Repercussion, boom! You now have an infinitely increasing stack of damage constantly bouncing between you and the Stuffy Doll, with no way for it to ever resolve completely. Unless your opponent is sitting on a Disenchant, in which case he just waits until the damage is up around 10 billion or so, and then disenchants the Pariah...
  • Opalescence is an enchantment that turns all other enchantments into creatures. Day of the Dragons is an enchantment that exiles all of your creatures and replaces them with dragons until DotD leaves the battlefield. If you cast Day of the Dragons while Opalescence is on the battlefield, DotD will replace all of your creatures with dragons, including itself. but since that causes DotD to leave the battlefield, your newly created dragon tokens will go away and your original creatures will return, including Day of the Dragons. DotD entering the battlefield again will cause all of your creatures, including DotD, to be replaced with dragons, and so on, and so on...
    • Then there's Opalescence + Humility. Opalescence turns enchantments into creatures with the enchantment as an effect, Humility removes effects from creatures. So Humility removes Opalescence's ability, which makes it not a creature any more and thus not subject to Humility and thus it gets its effect back which makes it subject to Humility, or Humility becomes a creature and thus subject to its own effect which removes the effect that is removing effects... and so on until either someone gives up with a headache or manages to figure out the errata made specifically for that interaction.
  • Put both Platinum Angel and Transcendence on the battlefield. If you have (or reach) 20 life, transcendence will trigger its "lose the game" ability, which will do nothing due to Platinum Angel. However, after the ability resolves, it will automatically trigger again and do nothing. After that, it will trigger again. And again. And again...
• Because of Platinum Angel (ability: you can't lose the game and your opponents can't win the game) and Abyssal Persecutor (ability: you can't win the game and your opponents can't lose the game) it is possible for two players to end up with some combination that prevents either from winning and then exhaust all possible means in either deck for the responsible cards to be destroyed. Not even a deck-out can end the game at that point.

Pokémon TCG

• In the old days, you were technically allowed to retreat a Pokémon as much as you wanted. What does this mean when you have two free retreaters? Simple: a never-ending game!
• A particularly famous - albeit rare - example in the Pokémon TCG involves two primary cards to establish a perfect stalemate: Mewtwo LV.X (Legends Awakened), a Pokémon protected entirely from non-evolved Pokémon; and Uxie (Legends Awakened), a card able to return itself - and all cards attached - back to the deck via its Psychic Restore attack. So, when both players are using decks with both cards, as well as no evolved Pokémon, the game often ends perfectly tied, with no remedy per the rules in sight.
  • To make matters worse, this stalemate has no practical remedy in tournament play at all: if it happens, you're in for a long, drawn-out 40 minute round. When it's all over, the judges will either A) make you go to sudden death all over again, where this could repeat indefinitely, or B) simply give you and your opponent double game losses for delaying the event (ties are not allowed).
• Metal Arceus's Metal Barrier attack can activate this trope if your last Pokémon is a LV.X Pokémon.
  • There's a combination of cards in the unlimited format that can consistently win the game before your opponent can take a turn. Nobody's managed to come up with a reliable way to defend against it.
  • Pokemon has a system where six random cards from the deck are set aside at the beginning of a match and can only be taken by scoring a KO on your opponent. Because you can only run four copies of any given card, it's entirely possible that all four of any given card can end up among these. Certain decks, such as Durant Mill, that rely on a single card can be rendered completely helpless thanks to this system.

Sentinels of the Multiverse

• Many situations like this can come up with villains that have special win/lose conditions, mostly as a result of the Final Wasteland environment removing cards from play. For example, if more than two of The Chairman's underbosses are taken out of the game, the players will never be able to make him flip to his vulnerable side.
• Certain villains are immune to certain types of damage — Shu of the Ennead and Gloomweaver on Advanced mode, for instance, are immune to melee and projectile damage. If you have a team of heroes that can only do those damage types, in an environment which can't help in any way, that villain is unbeatable.

Other Games

• Takara Tomy thought of nearly everything when they made a licensed Collectible Card Game based on Inazuma Eleven. Every card has a "BCP" number in the corner, which is used for several things including tiebreakers: in case of a tie for action precedence, each player flips over the next card in their deck and higher BCP wins out. If both have the same BCP, repeat until the tie is resolved. All cards drawn are discarded after the tie is resolved. If one player runs out of cards, they shuffle their discard pile and start drawing cards from there. If their discard pile and their deck are both empty, they automatically lose. Now, if both players made their decks solely out of cards all with the exact same BCP value and they hit a tie while having the same total number of cards in their deck + discard pile, the game would go into a recursive loop until both players run out of cards, ending the match in a double loss.

Tabletop Games

Dungeons & Dragons

• Lost Tomb of Martek: The three Star Gems must be placed in the altar in the Garden of the Cursed so the Player Characters can continue. However, the Star Gems are also needed much later in the adventure to revive Martek, but there's no way for the Player Characters to know this. If they assume the Star Gems have fulfilled their purpose and forget to remove them from the altar, they're in trouble. The Crystal Prism area effect that teleports the Player Characters to the Citadel of Martek only works once. Once they reach the Citadel, even if they use the Teleport wall in the Citadel to return to the Garden of the Cursed to get the Star Gems they can't get to the Citadel of Martek again.
• In the Hoard of the Dragon Queen adventure for fifth edition D&D, the Player Characters may have several extremely difficult encounters in Skyreach, a floating castle. If the players decide to retreat to recuperate - for example, by Feather Falling off the edge - as written there's no way for them to return.

Other Games

• The "Das Boot" adventure for Paranoia is notorious for unwinnable states, to the extent that a specific warning for the gamemaster was inserted in the Flashbacks reprint. Once the Player Characters have obtained the "U-Bot" submarine, any mistake in using it will likely doom both them and the sub. Frequent Player Character death is a normal part of Paranoia, and Player Characters have multiple clones available for exactly this reason; but there's only one sub. The original adventure gives no way to get it back nor to proceed without it. Game over.

Toys

• LEGO Super Mario: If Bowser's tail and arms are in the wrong positions, they can get him stuck on the bridge of the Bowser's Castle Boss Battle set so he either catches himself on the rails or never falls into the gap in front of it.

Gamebooks

• In one Lone Wolf gamebook, you are tasked with solving a demoness' riddle and turning to the section with the same number as the answer. While the answer can be found by flipping through pages to find the appropriate section, nobody has yet come up with a satisfactory way to get the answer from the question. Looked at mathematically, the question is insoluble, asking the player to derive a variable without enough information to do so. It's likely the author just messed up the math. Failing the riddle doesn't stop progression, though, but force you into a fight against a minor Eldritch Abomination.
• There is also the possibility of translation or paragraph number errors in foreign editions; among others, J.H. Brennan's The Curse of Frankenstein's French edition had, straight at the beginning, an inescapable paragraph loop.
• A couple of Nintendo Adventure Books accidentally have the page numbers swapped on puzzle pages, resulting in a successful puzzle solve directing you to turn to a bad ending and a failed one directing you to the correct result.
• Fighting Fantasy:
  • In The Crimson Tide, the player starts out as a child with a maximum SKILL score of 6, as opposed to the usual 12. Unfortunately, the editor of the book failed to realize this and increased the maximum SKILL of one of the first monsters you encounter from 6 to 12, thereby making the game more or less completely unwinnable at time of publication (since the error became apparent and the author of the book described the editor as "an idiot", most people reduce the monster's SKILL score accordingly).
  • Creature of Havoc: Escape from the starting dungeon relies on a Plot Coupon that detects secret doors, which has the reader skip a specific number of paragraphs ahead from any entry that includes a specific sentence, providing a more helpful version of the entry. That sentence was omitted from one of the paragraphs, although the alternate version is there for anyone who guesses to look. This was only a proofreading error, but at least one reviewer believes that the resulting need to make a logical leap without prompting actually improves the book.

Game Shows

• Any game which used a Bingo-type gameboard, requiring correct answers to help form and eventually complete a straight line or other side-to-side connection, to win a prize or bonus. Most commonly, too many mistakes often no longer allowed for a winning connection to be made; these examples included Blockbusters (the "Gold Rush" end game) and Catchphrase (although highly unlikely, since there were 12 ways to win). However, in the game Lingo, where usually two balls were required to be able to have a chance at completing a winning side-to-side connection (the contestant was given one ball at the outset, and had to through correctly completing five-letter words, had to earn additional balls), several contestants were unable to get one word correct ... meaning the contestant had no opportunity to complete a side-to-side connection.
• Pyramid:
  • In the front game, through too many mistakes before the final of six seven-word categories was played. The game automatically ended if any contestant was behind by eight or more points after the fifth question, or even sooner if the contestant was mathematically eliminated through a mistake.
    • Zigzagged in at least some iterations of the show, in which if the sixth category was a bonus category such as 7-11 or Mystery 7, the contestant was allowed to play the category in order to possibly win the prize even though the other contestant was guaranteed being in the Winner's Circle. In this case a mistake automatically ended the front game.
  • In the Winner's Circle bonus round, giving an unacceptable clue to any of the categories at any point ended the chance at the top prize being played for ... although the contestant could still win cash for guessing any of the other remaining categories.
• The Price Is Right: Several:
  • Pay the Rent is the most common example. The objective is to arrange a set of six products (without being shown the correct prices, natch) on four tiers — with one on the first and fourth rows, and two on the center two rows — in a way that the price (or total combined price of two items) is progressively higher for each tier. If the contestant successfully does this for all four rows, he/she wins a $100,000 bonus; the contestant is shown the total of each row one at a time and allowed to quit at any time, as a mistake at any point loses all accumulated cash. The trope kicks in where the contestant fails to put the most expensive item on the top row (always the correct answer), meaning he cannot win the top prize and needs to quit beforehand.
  • Small prize games, including Secret 'X', Master Key, Punch a Bunch, Five Price Tags, Bonus Game and Rat Race, among others, where contestants must earn all opportunities to win games of chance — or, in the case of Secret "X", at least one "X" to be able to complete a Tic-Tac-Toe; or, in "Five Price Tags" a guess of the correct price — failing to guess at least one small price question correctly ends the game and the prize-winning portion of the game is not played.
• The Amazing Race:
  • In the first season, three teams were essentially eliminated on leg nine, since the next leg had a strict Hours of Operation time limit that made it impossible for the two teams who technically did survive to ever catch up to the lead pack. Over the next four legs, the 3rd and 4th place teams were arriving at the Pit Stops over twelve hours behind the top two teams, meaning they were actually arriving after the leading teams had already started the next leg. This meant that by the last episode of the season, they were doing tasks that the other teams had completed in the previous episode, making their continuing to race merely a formality. Subsequent seasons added deliberate equalizers, points at which teams are forced to be evened up with each other, to go along with the looser "bunching points" that caused many of the problems near the end of Season 1.
  • On All-Stars, Bill & Joe, the same team who got screwed by the equalizers in Season 1, were caught in ANOTHER Unwinnable situation. The course designers had accidentally scheduled leg 6 to coincide with a religious holiday in Africa, which screwed up the airports and once again put them over 12 hours behind. They did manage to somewhat catch up to the pack by leg 8, but by then they were slapped with the Marked for Elimination penalty to overcome on a very short leg containing an Intersection (which made it impossible to finish more than 30 minutes ahead of the other teams) and a Fast Forward (which prevented them from finishing first), which is pretty much impossible to pull off. They still maintain that the team they did the intersection with purposefully did it slowly so they couldn’t get a thirty minute lead over them.
  • Similarly; accidents have caused the game to become unwinnable for individual players. Such as players accidentally losing their passports or money, or even injury.
  • It took 17 seasons (on the American version) for a two women team to win because a lot of the logistics of the earlier seasons put them at a disadvantage. The challenges used to be more based on brute strength and having to consume large amounts of food whereas the more recent seasons’ challenges are more team work/ logic based. The partners also didn’t have to split the roadblocks evenly in the very early seasons so teams with at least a man would just have him plow through the strength roadblocks whereas it took the women more time. Now even in a man/woman team, the woman will inevitably have to do a strength challenge due to the law of averages. In season 5, three couples got to the top three and the female partners only did a roadblock apiece. It took a team of half marathon running female anesthesiologists to win because they were smart, fit, detail oriented, and knew how to work together under pressure.
• Strictly Come Dancing once had to cancel the elimination in the three-way semi-final when the third-placed couple could not escape it even had they won the public vote. The votes were carried forward to the final, and future series would have five couples in the semi-final.

In-Universe Examples

• Sburb, the Reality Warper computer game from Homestuck, can be rendered unwinnable by a whole host of outside events.
  • Any behavior that deviates from the Paradox Space-determined Alpha Timeline will create a doomed and unwinnable offshoot timeline. The only thing that can be salvaged is information passed to the Alpha Timeline such as Davesprite's knowledge about the trap Terezi laid for John.
  • The destined player chain must be completed for the session to be winnable. This can go wrong in several ways: Loss of the original game discs requires finding replacements. Dave has to strife his older brother for the only extra copy, then use a game hack to replace John's lost server disc. Entry must be achieved before the meteor timer runs out. In the offshoot timeline Davesprite came from, John died fighting his Denizen too early in the game. Without him, Jade was unable to enter the Medium and (presumably) died when the meteor struck her house. Dave and Rose can't progress past a certain point without their co-players, and Dave is forced to travel back in time to Set Right What Once Went Wrong. A player dies before entry without a backup dream self. Dream-selves salvage the post-Scratch troll session after Aradia and Sollux's deaths, and the post-Scratch human session after Roxy and Dirk's deaths.
  • The sprite prototyping process can break the game if not done with extreme care. First, pre-entry prototyping must be completed by all players for the Battlefield to reach the correct end-game form. The post-Scratch humans are all prevented from prototyping until after entry, resulting in a Void Game that is unwinnable without external intervention. Second, the item used for prototyping is vitally important as the game's villains gain powers and traits based on it. The pre-Scratch humans accidentally prototyped Becquerel and gave their enemies godlike powers that broke the game so badly one of the bosses escaped their session and screwed over the trolls. In the post-Scratch troll session, the Black Queen took Aradia's frog prototyping as a personal insult.
  • Failing to collect all the genetic codes for the Genesis Frog gives the resulting universe cancer. Not only is a bomb called The Tumor placed within the battlefield when the inhabitants start their own session, but a series of events occurs that results in Jack Noir becoming all-powerful, escaping the session and then killing the universe from the outside.
  • Another group of players didn't put anything into the kernelsprites. While this stopped the enemies and final boss from gaining any special powers, this prevents the Reckoning, and thus the final boss fight, from occurring. This makes the session doomed to continue in stalemate for eternity.
  • Two siblings had planned on playing the game with only two people rather than the larger groups it was made to be played by (to be fair, they didn't really have anyone else to play it with). This would have (barely) worked, until one of the two killed the other before the game began and then tried to play alone. This resulted in a game so severely different that it could barely be called the same game (but it appears that the game was designed to address this possibility).
• The Machinae Supremacy song "Indiscriminate Murder is Counter-Productive" is sung from the point of view of a gamer whose reckless killing of NPCs has left him unable to receive necessary information to win.
• In-universe example: on the Sitcom Newhart, George invents a wildly popular board game where every space landed on gives the player 3 points. The first to score exactly one million points wins. Not until someone actually reaches that point does anyone involved realize that one million is not divisible by three.
• Sword Art Online Abridged:
  • SAOA has this happen with the titular game when the boss of Floor 75 glitches out and dies without the players doing anything - and doesn't flag the exit to open, trapping the clearing team indefinitely and making it impossible to progress to the next floor.
  • Kayaba wonders aloud if the players trapped in his game don't crave death... and not just any death, but the stupidest deaths possible, based on how they keep managing to invoke this trope. For example, Thinker agrees to a peace talk in the heart of a dungeon, doesn't bring any weapons, gear, or teleport crystals, and then believes the guy who abandons him there when he tells him calling for help is impossible because of bad reception. And to top it off, he doesn't warn the people who come to rescue him of an approaching boss, which almost gets them killed as well.
• Stephen Baxter's short story Phase Space involves humans discovering that the universe they can observe is actually a sophisticated simulation, which is expanding at about the same rate of human advancement. So they do something that the simulation designers would never expect - concentrate nearly all of the Earth's resources into sending a high-energy laser pulse to Alpha Centauri, thus reaching it before they would naturally be expected to, and going beyond the current boundary of the simulation. This causes the entire thing to begin malfunctioning, with reality collapsing around the solar system as many alternate possibilities are made manifest, until the unreality wave reaches Earth, where it is effectively game over.
• Jumanji: As demonstrated in 1969, it is very possible to have the game stall out by letting the game suck one of the players into Jumanji, and not being freed via another player rolling 5 or 8.
• Zathura: The Astronaut is a former player who once had a Moment of Weakness and then realized he was now unable to continue playing. The former-timeline version of Walter, he got a wish-granting card and angrily wished for his brother Danny to disappear, only to find that the board was still awaiting Danny's turn.

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