[REVIEW] Fiasco

[reverancepavane]

Title: Fiasco Author: Jason Morningstar Publisher: Bully Pulpit Games ISBN: 978-1-934859-39-1 SKU: BPG005 Published: December 2009 RRP: US$20/US$10 (Book/PDF @ IPR)

 

Description:Fiasco is inspired by the cinematic tales of small-time capers that go incredibly wrong. Films such as Fargo, Blood Simple, Burn After Reading, and The Way of the Gun. You play ordinary people with powerful ambition and poor impulse control. Things won't go well for them, as their dreams collapse in a glorious heap of jealousies, murder, and recrimination. Lives and reputations will be lost, and if you are lucky, you might just survive to end up back where you started. [Paraphrased from introduction.]

Setting: Fiasco has no implicit setting of it's own, although the choice of setting is an important part of setting the context of a game. It provides a number of fully realized settings, called playsets, that are suitable scenes for a fiasco: Main Street (a "Nice Southern Town"), Boomtown (Wild West), Tales From Suburbia, and The Ice (Antarctic Research Station). Generating additional playsets wouldn't be that hard, and may in fact be a fun pregame activity in and of itself.

Character Generation: Fiasco is a storytelling game. There is no explicit character generation – rather the character (or lack thereof) of the participants is revealed during play.

Mechanics: Uses a shared pool of black and white d6 (4 per player) as the currency of the game. These are initially rolled to determine the possible relationships in the game during the Set-Up phase. Players take turns to choose dice out of the pool, consulting the relevant setting Playset to determine what it actually represents. Once all dice have been chosen all characters will have some sort of Relationship (eg: "Friendship/Bitter Enemies") with the character of the adjacent player, and each Relationship will be complicated by some sort of Need, Object, or Location (eg: Object/Transportation/Ice Cream Truck). The dice are then returned to the central pool.

The players now take turns to spotlight their character in a scene. At some point an outcome, either positive or negative, is determined, either by the other players (if the active player established the scene) or by the active player (if the other players established the scene). The outcome is signified by taking a dice from the pool (either white or black) and awarding it to the player. Depending on the stage of the game, the dice is either kept or handed off to another player. For example, a scene might focus in flash-back on how two long-time friends decided to invest in an icecream truck, only to have the business fail, and each now bitterly blames the other for the failure. Now this is probably not a positive outcome so a black dice is awarded. In the First Act the player would probably give the black dice to his "friend," in the Second Act he would get to keep it himself.

Once all dice have been handed out the game has almost ended. All that is left is for players to roll the accumulated dice they have earned to determine the eventual fate of their characters. Having a mixture of dice is bad, since the white dice total reduces the black dice total, and vice versa, and to get away with a non-tragic ending usually takes a very high roll. This is supposed to be a fiasco after all.

Thoughts: Fiasco looks like it will be an excellent game to play. It is the sort of game that is an ideal pick-up game at a gaming con, and should fit easily into a single gaming slot. The rules are very easy to pick up. However it does require the players to get into the spirit of the genre to be truly successful; a player unwilling to actively embrass failure might affect the play dynamic, although I do think it will handle it. I do however think it is an excellent introduction to storytelling games for the gamer that hasn't previous come across this concept. Especially given that if the player is running on empty when it gets to their turn, they can always ask someone else to set their scene for them.

Rating: Excellent.