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Fiasco is about recreating a caper movie through interactive roleplaying, from opening scene to the last reel where almost all of the characters are dead, ruined, in jail or (just maybe) filthy rich and living large. Players choose a playset (a predetermined matrix of story elements appropriate to a particular setting), throw a pile of dice, and the dice determine (subject to some player choices and result interpretation) the outline of the story. The playsets provided all deal with subgenres in the caper movie genre: scheming people running around backstabbing and getting themselves into social, criminal or romantic scrapes that usually end badly for everyone.
During each person's "turn", the table collaboratively narrates a scene in the story, focusing on the character whose turn it is. That player can either choose to establish the scene (describe where it occurs, how it starts, and structures the dialogue) or to resolve the scene (set what happens at the end, up to and including sucess, failure, death, or worse). If you establish, the table resolves, and gives you a white or black die (signalling a positive or negative outcome, respectively). If you resolve, you pick the die and the outcome, but (in the first half of the game), hand the die off to one of your buddies.
When half the dice are gone, there is an intermission of sorts where Something Bad and Crazy Happens. This is determined randomly with reference to a list of stock movie plot developments, all of which heighten interpersonal conflict among the characters and send things out of control. The last half of the game (referred to Act Two) generally follows the story telling model of the first half (referred to as Act One), only in Act Two, if you choose to resolve, you get to keep the die for yourself.
Everyone gets an epilogue. The epilogue is constrained only generally in terms of how your character turns out. How bad or good that is depends on the difference of a dice throw between your black dice and white dice. Hence, the more of one color you have (if, say, you've taken nothing but lumps the whole scenario), the better you are likely to turn out. This encourages a certain amount of dealmaking, undermining and backstabbing between the characters, and a fun dynamic as the various conspiracies and schemes they are engaged in unravel.
I picked this game up at the Indie booth at Origins a few weeks ago. I looked at all the nominees and such and was generally underwhelmed. This was the only book I bought this year, and the only one I've cared to review in a long time. It is that much fun.
The playsets are where this kind of games stands or falls, since the system is simple and heavily dependent upon the input from the story element matrices in terms of cueing the players to stitch together a good, enjoyable session. The book comes with four: Nice Southern Town (good, think True Romance), Boomtown (meh), Tales from Suburbia (excellent, think American Beauty) and The Ice (completely nuts, set in Antarctica, but think Fargo). A fifth one, Vegas (excellent) came with at the show.
That is not to say that Fiasco's perfect. Interactive story-telling games often require everyone sitting at the table to be both familiar with the source material, and able to take a scene and really run with it. Fiasco is no exception, but a non-gaming spouse who sat down to play could be dragged along with some difficulty, particularly if he/she stuck to Resolving scenes. It does, however, balance playability with
Also, the replay value of this kind of game really demands that fresh, well-written playsets/story prompts keep coming. Playing this game with a good, well-thought out playset is awesome. Playing it with a bad one would not be. Fortunately, Bully Pulpit has been putting up Playsets of the Month on its website (the Last Frontier one is hilarious, so sayeth someone from Alaska such as myself). This fact (which will hopefully continue for some time) makes the book a strong buy recommendation.
Also, it's an indy book. It is not the Rebecca Guay illustrated hybrid of rules and coffeetable book that many reviewers seem to think is important to a strong presentation. Rather, it means that the price mechanics ($20) vs. the layout (adequate, but with scarce and largely representational art--but bonus points for a very useful and content laden website) are what they are. And although it is nominally 130 pages, it's a softcover the size of a standard hardback and the playsets are very "spacey"; it's more like an 80 page book. I did also have to read it several times to get a sense of how to run it; this is one of those games where the best way to learn how to play is for everyone to have a copy of the book in front of them and just work through a session.
I don't usually review games because I'm a horrific nitpicker with very high standards, but Fiasco meets them. It made me put down my own indy game writing project and write a playset for Hollywood Noir (think The Blue Dahlia, Mildred Pierce and Sunset Boulevard). This evening I'm going to type it up and maybe you'll see it someday. Only my hardboiled, overdressed war veteran will end up living happily ever after with Veronica Lake's scheming, manipulative scorned wife of a nightclub owner with a secret past--assuming my dice stay nice and uniformly colored.
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