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.

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.

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.

this week we are continuing Fiasco because this game requires us to spend lots of time on it. we resumed what we have left last week. because i am not the type of person who are good at making story. as the game continues, i realize my ability of making story is decreasing. to sum up, this game is just a story-making game. people need to make story based their background and logic. however, i realize that people are getting less and less dependent on the logic but more and more on the feeling as the game goes into deep. i have to admit that this game is very interesting, people are getting more familiar with each other when they interact with each other. however, this game is racking my brains so hard. because i am not a native speaker, i need to first come up with some ideas about the story and then translate them to English. i think this is the hardest part of the game, especially for our international student. however, playing Fiasco is also a good way for me to improve my logic and speaking.

as for leadership, i have to admit that in this game, i am the one who are led by other players because of the two reasons: one is that i am not quite familiar with this game at the very beginning and therefore need someone to explain the steps of the game. the other reason is what i just mentioned. i am not a native speaker and my understanding is limited sometimes regarding the subjective other players talks about.

the session goes well because people are getting more familiar with each other and are not shy anymore. moreover, because the other three players in my group are girls and they are good at talking, our discussion is filled with fun and laughs. and forget to mention that the winner of the game is Garrison. i think her story is the most interesting story and her logic is always easy to understand. i think this game is also popular in China due to the challenge it presents. to sum up, this game is really good and i hope to play with my friends in the future.

For week’s one, two, and three we played the game Fiasco. I was completely unfamiliar with the game and how to play and so that was the biggest challenge overall. I played with Alyssa, Grayson, and two other students who fluctuated in and out of the game. My character was a plumber who was non-binary, different from my own pronouns which are she/her, so that was also a bit challenging as people would often misgender me, unintentionally, as they forgot to call me by my character’s name or would address me as ma’am.

This game was amazing for leadership as it was completely improv and roleplay and therefore everyone involved had the freedom to include themselves in a situation, i.e. starting or resolving a situation. Another way leadership factored into this was when it came time to determine whether a situation was resolved or not and whether to give a character a positive or negative token, in which most cases we couldn’t agree and someone would eventually decide for the sake of progressing the game/storyline.

I think this game would be really enjoyable for a lot of people, age groups, and is non-detail specific in that each individual decides how much to reveal about their character, including their backstory, and can limit their involvement in the story if they are more into being a group member rather than a leader for that specific situation.

All of our sessions went very well, the storyline was really fun to build, and as we got more comfortable with our accents and remember each character’s names and pronouns, the game was quite enjoyable. There were a few moments where it felt as though I was playing a game with a group of my closest friends and there were no fears of embarrassment or judgment whatsoever.

This week in EDL 290T, our class continued playing Fiasco using the scenarios that we had set up the previous week. Fiasco is a dice-based game where players have to collaborate and create character backstories, then throw those characters into various scenes based on the rolls of their dice.

Our class continued with the same Zoom breakout rooms as the week before. Our team made it through the first half of Fiasco and was setting up the tilt, but we were the only group not to make it into the second half of gameplay. In Fiasco, the tilt is a central “plot twist” that makes for a challenge that has to be incorporated into the scenes in the second half of the game. The tilt is usually something that results in a catastrophe for at least a few of the players; the tilt, like all other elements of story setup in Fiasco, is dependent on the roll of the dice and is chosen by the players who have the highest roll totals for the “good ending” white dice and “bad ending” black dice.

The big challenge this week was communication; one member of the group had their wisdom teeth removed in between classes and other players had mic issues. We were able to use the chat within Zoom to coordinate some aspects of gameplay, but it did slow us down as a group. For me, the most fun part of the week was working out who got to do what to incorporate some of the elements we’d built into our storyline during the setup process, like the crashed helicopter and an Antarctic firetruck.

The gameplay within Fiasco ties into leadership because there are sometimes unexpected elements that come up seemingly out of nowhere to complicate situations. As leaders, having good communication and coordination within a team can make dealing with the unexpected easier. I could see my friend Will, who is big into disaster movies, enjoying this game because of the chaotic elements that have to be incorporated via the tilt.