For these couple of weeks, we played the game Fiasco. Fiasco is a role-playing game where your character can be whoever you want them to be, as long as it fits under the conditions that you roll for at the beginning. There are four main categories you roll for: relationships (between you and the 2 players on either side of you), needs, location, and objects. These different categories build the world around you, as each player gets their own.

For the first week, we spent most of our time figuring out the rolling and how everything worked. However, we did manage to get started on the story and got close to where the Tilt happens. I really enjoyed learning how the game worked here, as I’d never played a tabletop RPG like this, and having Grayson in our group helped immensely!

The story that we set up and created, was in my opinion, pretty dang cool. We had a southern town, where I was a corrupt sheriff, Grayson was the county coroner (so our characters worked together a lot), Veronica had a really cool non-binary mechanic/plumber, and Yihao had Henry, who was a stranger with a golf cart. For the story in the first week, we spent most of it getting our characters together and setting it up to introduce our big twist and our crime boss named Morrow Wilson.

For the second week, we explored more of the twist (which involved a fresh skeleton hidden under a house along with a mysterious briefcase. However, we weren’t expecting the real-life twist of Yihao not being there for the meeting, so we had to adapt and eventually made one of the twists be that the skeleton was actually Henry. We continued working through the Tilt and the story and eventually we reached the end of class. We weren’t able to finish the story fully, but we got really close to the end and called it there.

One of the challenges I had with this game was the acting. Having never played anything like this, I wasn’t experienced at all with acting and getting into character. Both of my teammates were great at it and I felt like I was bad at it. However, I learned (albeit near the end) to embrace the goofiness of it and had a good time with it.

Overall, I really enjoyed playing Fiasco, and I think my dad would really enjoy playing the game too. It really relates to leadership in the way that you can become whoever you want to be. You lead your own life in the game, which means you can lead your groupmates/fellow characters through the story even if you wouldn’t do it normally. I think this game was what helped me to start taking charge a little more in other group projects.