We played part 1 of Fiasco and ended our session right before the twist. The hardest part of this game was getting past social anxiety and the awkwardness of playing it with people you don’t know well. It is a game that involves a lot of story telling and acting, this can be uncomfortable and embarrassing if you don’t know the people you are playing with very well. It ties to leadership because it takes one brave person to break out of their shell and get the story rolling. Once one person gets over their initial embarrassment the other players follow. The leader has to show that it’s okay to get laughed at.

I think my friend Damien would like this game. He loves DND and storytelling. Damien has DM’d multiple campaigns for our friends so I could see him being extremely good at helping bring Fiasco to life. Our play session took place in a school and involved a drug dealing cop, a secretary on crack, a science teacher with a meth lab hidden in his classroom, and a school principal in love with a fourth grader. It was very chaotic and the storyline was all over the place, but by the time we go to the plot twist all of the characters had a goal.

I really liked how the game is almost completely up to the players. At first, I struggled with the concept of the dice because I had a hard time grasping how that mechanism worked. While the characters in this game did not reflect our moral values AT ALL, they did come out in some aspects of the game. For instance, anytime the principal was being creepy there was a collective groan or gag. It’s very hard to contain your morals when playing such awful people.