Tag Archives: Fiasco

fiasco week 1

This week we played fiasco! At first I wasn’t too interested in it but once I watched the videos and read a bit it really got my wheels turning. It is a fast-paced diceless RPG which revolves around snap choices and improv. It seems more complex than it is at first glance but we really hit a stride and found our groove eventually.

Online connection was still a struggle but we got together in 15 minutes instead of 30 this time! Progress! The most difficult part of the game was following the dice guidelines, we really wanted to use some specifics but we were really limited by the dice we rolled which was a little disappointing. I also think we had some organizational issues and that concerns me for our next round of playing.

I think this game has an interesting view on leadership, that being co-leadership and collaboration. The entire game needs you to lean on the other players and to work with them and build the story. This has its predicted troubles and successes like having difficulty with having different motives or ideas but also the success of working together and having different viewpoints.

Game of the Week Blog Reflection: Fiasco Week 1

This week in Tabletop Leadership we played Fiasco. Fiasco is a role-playing game in which 3-5 players develop characters, relationships, objects, and locations together to create a scenario. These scenarios will either end good or badly, depending on how your mates perceive your situation. In my opinion, the hardest part of the game is understanding the point of it. It is very different from any game I’ve ever played. I struggled to understand what the overall goal is. Even when I knew how to play the game, I would get lost in the set up phase because there were a lot of characteristics to remember and keep track of. That is why it is good to write notes while you play!

Fiasco ties to leadership because it requires a lot of thinking ahead. If you are on top of everything then you can manipulate situation so that it goes well for your character. Leadership is all about influencing others. In Fiasco, your characters can be very influencing and you can steer the direction of the story to your favor. That is why I believe my friend Alex would enjoy this game. I see him as a natural leadership and he would want to get a full grasp on the situation within the game. He would be good at influencing others to help his character out and find the best possible solutions for the end.

In week 1, my group was only able to complete the set up phase. The session ended as soon as we named our characters. It wasn’t hard to figure out how to pick die and develop the characters, so we went faster as the game went on. None of us have played before which is why it took longer for set up than some other groups. I believe the session went well and we are all excited to see how it goes next week. I don’t have a complaint about the game, however I am worried about how well I’ll do while playing. I’m not particular skilled on improvisation, so coming up with scenes might be a bit difficult for me. Luckily the rest of my group seems to have a good handle on the game and I’m excited to see how crazy this story can get.

Game of the Week Blog Reflection: Fiasco Week 1

This week, we played another game called Fiasco, which is also a roll player game. In this game, we need to create and define our own relationships, needs, objects, locations and so on. And we need to make all of these into a story, which is fun. However, the hardest part for me is also to make a story by this information, I am not a very creative person, so it was very difficult for me to put all this information together and make up a story that worked.

I think for the leadership in this game, the most important is every player should actively communicate their ideas, because every choice they make affects not just them but everyone else, and every decision affects the direction of our own story. I think me and my roommates might be able to enjoy this game because we always play other games together, so it is easy and comfortable for us to communicate our ideas.

During the session, there were 4 group members besides me. After we all connected in, we chose Boomtown and set the boundaries which we did not remove anything actually, and we just finished chose and defined our relationships, needs, locations and objects. The session went pretty good since all my group members actively communicated our ideas. I like this game because I never played this kind of game before, it requires people to exchange their ideas to others so that they can make their own story which is cool. Since I am not a creative person, my personal value in this game is to take note so that things will no mess up which is also very important. Because if people do not remember what they chose, they will waste time to redo it, and it will cause us to fall behind schedule.

Game of the Week Blog Reflection: Fiasco

This week in class we played another role-playing game called Fiasco. In our first session, we set up the game in Boom Boomtown and established boundaries that we were not comfortable crossing with the consent checklist. I really liked the fact that this game required us to have an open dialogue to express things we did not want to see play out in the game, I think this is an important aspect that should be included in all types of games. Our group was pretty open to anything with a rated R rating but we would not allow things like sexual assault, self-harm, etc. Once we completed the checklist, we rolled dice and took turns picking aspects like relationships, needs, locations, and objects.

Compared to last week’s game of Roll Player, I greatly enjoyed Fiasco more. Since the players have such a large degree of freedom in determining the course of the game the plot twists are both unexpected and humorous. I think that’s what I liked the most, never knowing what to expect next and laughing at whoever is currently establishing a scene. The only thing I struggled with the most was definitely the creativity aspect of the game. It is harder than you think to come up with ways to both keep the plot interesting but also ensure that it makes sense.

I think the most important leadership aspects in this game were trust, creativity, and active listening. Trust because you have to believe the other players won’t violate the consent checklist. Creativity and active listening because most of the game is playing off of what the other players do or say so you have to be present and engaged to help steer the narrative. It can also be argued that another leadership element is the fact that players get to decide who they want their characters to be in the beginning so free will is present. I would recommend this game to both friends and family because it seems like a game that could function as a fun night in or at a party.

Game of the Week: Fiasco (Weeks 1 and 2)

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.

Game of the Week: Fiasco

Fiasco is the first of the tabletop RPGs we played in class. In it, you build a character around the relationships you have with the other people at your game table, then set that character loose to cause trouble. Our group played using the Main Street playset, which takes place in an ostensibly “nice” southern small town. The online setting of our class made things slightly more difficult than usual, but we made due using a shared spreadsheet and an online dice roller.

This was not my first time playing Fiasco, so I had some experience (and high expectations) going in. This game’s maelstrom of bad decisions and high emotions can be a lot of fun, but it really depends on the people you’re playing with and how well you can match the energy of the group. One of our group members had difficulty participating due to technical difficulties, but the other two were excellent players. Getting everything set up and communicated properly was by far the hardest part of the game; once we had established a rhythm of starting and finishing scenes, we had a great time playing.

Personal values, relationships, goals and desires take center stage in every game of Fiasco. I was playing a character that was quite different from myself, but aspects of my own values still came out in play. The context of role playing games can give us an avenue to explore what it’s like to be a different person. Because your personal values affect every decision you make, they become extra important in a leadership context. Making sure that your values align with those of your team is essential to success.

Fiasco Week 2

In our fourth week of class, we finished our two-week session of Fiasco. In our session, we started with the tilt, which added interesting complications to our characters’ plots, and then built off these complications to end our plots. For my character specifically, things had been going okay for him as a gambling baseball player in the first act. In the second act, however, he got caught in the act and faced serious consequences toward the end of the game. In the aftermath of the game, my character had ended up being killed by his former teammates. Our session was not too long as we finished the game in about 45 minutes, and we played a different game until the end of class.

I found this second half of the game to be a lot more interesting than the first half. In the first half, we spent a big chunk of our time creating our characters and getting started on our plots. In the second half, the game really accelerated into all sorts of problems for the characters because of the tilt. The nicest thing about this, though, is that each problem was really developed by the players. We all came up with interesting outcomes for our characters, and I appreciate games that give that sort of freedom. The hardest part of this week was still the online dynamic. I feel like I struggled a bit more with the online story-telling dynamic more this week compared to last week, and had trouble playing off others because I could not really see them and interact face-to-face.

As far as leadership goes, it is a lot like what I said about the previous week. We all had to adapt to new elements being introduced to the game as the tilt brought different problems for our characters. We developed our characters past the initial establishment of who they are, and we got to decide how we want to act when faced with trouble. We had the freedom of decision-making within the game that correlates directly with the fates of our characters.

Fiasco Week 1

For our third week of class, we played a fun role-playing game called Fiasco. To summarize our session, three of us established our characters, relations, and location through rolling dice, and built a dynamic story completely built by ourselves utilizing our dice rolls. By the end of our session, we had reached the halfway point and had developed conflicts for our characters in their stories. For example, my baseball playing character had been getting away with gambling well but had been getting more complacent with his ability to get away with it.

I personally enjoyed this game far more than the previous game, Roll Player. The main reason for this is that not only did we get to build characters, but we also got to fulfill the roles of those characters and develop the game past simply making characters. In my opinion, this makes for a more interesting experience for the players. This feels like the kind of game where people can really push their creative boundaries while operating within constraints developed by the game and the player’s ability to tell stories. It really gives the players a lot of freedom in how they tell their stories while also giving them general ideas to build upon. While we did have a lot of freedom, we did establish boundaries we were not comfortable crossing in the game to make the game approachable and more of a comfortable environment. It was a bit harder to play online as I could not really play off other players during the game because I could not see their faces. I kind of expect this to be a theme for multiple board games throughout the semester, but it is what it is.

I feel like the main elements of leadership in this game were the ability to adapt within the constraints of the game while also identifying on your own who you want to be in the game. The choice is up to the player on how they want to act during the game, but they need to be able to make choices based on relations are established at the start and adapt to the changes in the story as the game develops.

Week 2 and 3 (Fiasco)

In the second and third weeks of playing games in class we played a game called Fiasco. This game is all about story telling and interacting with other people. In Fiasco players tell a story through scenes where they interact with other players. The players interactions are based upon the setting in which they inhabit which is determined by dice and the players as they choose the relationships they share with each other. The outcomes of the scenes determine a characters outcome at the end of the story as characters collect dice for a scene either ending good for their character or poorly for their character. True to its name though this game typically ends up as a fiasco for some people and my group was no different.

In this game of Fiasco me and the other players played a group of a gambling baseball player who betted on their own games, a bookie who assisted in the baseball player’s gambling and was in his own legal troubles, and a lawyer who was the baseball player’s cousin and helping the bookie with his legal problems. In this game the baseball player wanted to make a huge gamble in the playoffs game his team was supposed to win against a much lesser team in terms of skill by throwing the game and collecting a large amount of cash. In the meantime the bookie was trying to save up money to get out of the gang he was in. All of these are the identities of the characters and an important part of being a leader, knowing yourself.

In this game leadership is displayed in two ways. The first of which is knowing your character in the game corresponding to knowing yourself in real life. This is demonstrated through how your character is “made” in the game. As you find what relations your character shares with others that is all you learn. Your character does not yet have a name, possibly profession, a favorite color, or many other traits that all people are expected to have. So you the player have to figure out what makes your character who they are, much as a leader has to understand who they themselves are. The other part of leadership that is relevant to this game is the ability to react to the unsuspected.

About halfway through Fiasco a game mechanic called the tilt happens. The tilt throws some unexpected curveball at the players that the players and their characters must react to. This demonstrates leadership simply in the fact that a good leader must be able to react to varying situations that may arise.

When I played the game I enjoyed it a lot. There were a lot of fun mechanics that made the game interesting in a way the same game would not be repeated again even if I tried really hard. I think my favorite part of the game was creating my character and their relations to other characters. This aspect of the game is really fun from a storytelling perspective as well as learning what other people want to do with their character. On the other hand I did not enjoy the end of the game.

At the end of the game all of the conflicts and story that happen in the game are resolved. In my game I the lawyer got off scot free from all potential problems pocketing some money from helping my cousin gamble. On the other hand the other members of my group the bookie and the baseball players had less desirable outcomes. The bookie ended up being harassed by his former gang for the rest of his life, in jail and out, after failing to out the gang boss in court. The baseball player was beaten up by his former teammates after getting caught betting against the team and throwing the game. While the ending of our story was interesting and exciting the mechanic that got us there worked relatively strangely.

The dice that are given from scenes throughout the game are used to determine the final outcome. The dice are rolled and you subtract the total of the dice from each other and the further away from zero the better the characters outcome. In the situation of having a lot of good dice this makes sense. However when rolling high on the bad dice this outcome seems very strange to me as in my head rolling even should be an impartial outcome whereas a high roll either other way should be some extreme, either fortune or misfortune. Overall this was my least favorite mechanic of the game.

In the end this game was a lot of fun to play and I enjoyed the time I spent playing it. I would recommend it to anybody who likes roleplaying games or just roleplaying. If I were to recommend this game to anybody I would definitely recommend it to my mom who enjoys roleplaying games like dungeons and dragons for the roleplaying aspect as well as many of my friends whom I play dungeons and dragons with.

Fiasco

In the second and third week of games, we played Fiasco. I thoroughly enjoyed the idea of the game, some of the most fun stories that are told are those of criminals and how their plans go awry, so I was excited to try and have a similar experience. I think one of Fiasco’s strengths is also one of the parts of the game that is hardest to master, that being the improvisational nature of the storytelling, with each scene and the direction of the story being entirely up to the players, with no facilitation from a designated game master. It was difficult to get into the flow of the game, but by the time my group hit the tilt, we seemed to have a pretty good grasp of how it worked.
For Fiasco, the ties to leadership are most prevalent in establishing the scenes in which the game is played. The player needs to take a lot of initiative in crafting their own game world and in establishing the story, there are no real rules for what you can and can’t do within a scene. It’s a very amorphous and free-flowing game, where the players’ choices will control not only the narrative but also the rules to some extent.
For the first week of Fiasco, the important task was to understand how one’s values would come into play over the course of the game. Over the course of the first session, I found more and more that I was allowing myself to play the character and set my own personal values aside. Personally, I am not someone that would engage in sports gambling or other types of acts, and yet I was perfectly fine to play the character of a bookie. I think the important thing to remember in the case of role playing games, like Fiasco, is to allow yourself to separate what you do from yourself because you are playing a character.
During the second week of Fiasco, the “tilt” took place. During the tilt, my character was taken hostage by organized crime. And while the game did not end well for my character from a consequences perspective, the flow of the game was greatly improved and expedited. Overall, my experience was incredibly positive. This is a game that I would recommend for team bonding exercises.