Crisis is a story game of escalating stakes racing against disaster to tell a story. Players define the margins and color in the major points at the beginning of the session, and explore those plots, people, and places in detail during the scenes themselves. Each scene features a player character designated the Protagonist whose story is told for that scene. Another player is their Foil, putting obstacles in their way to test them and show all of us what they are capable of. In this way, every player is both a character and a game master.
These challenges are resolved without dice by raising the stakes and pushing back against each other until a satisfying conclusion presents itself. At the end of every scene, one of the crises lurking on the horizon comes a step closer to fruition as clocks tick closer to doom, lending an urgency to the scenes as disaster is always an option.
Conflicts: Begin narrating the conflict, with each side justifying how things are going for them. If you have the lead, you will win the conflict unless something changes. To counter this, the other side may spend a point to take the lead. Describe how your advantages or sudden shifts in the conflict benefit you. If neither side has points or is willing to spend them, then the side with the lead wins the conflict and gets their stated goal (unless the twists and turns of the conflict have made that irrelevant, in which case the victor defines the end of the conflict as appropriate).