Fiasco

A storygame designed to model the crumbling plans of a group of antiheroes in the style of a Coen Brothers film, inspired by cinematic tales of small time capers gone disastrously wrong -- films like Blood Simple, Fargo, The Way of the Gun, Burn After Reading, and A Simple Plan. You'll play ordinary people with powerful ambition and poor impulse control. There will be big dreams and flawed execution. It won't go well for them, to put it mildly, and in the end it will probably all go south in a glorious heap of jealousy, murder, and recrimination. Lives and reputations will be lost, painful wisdom will be gained, and if you are really lucky, your guy just might end up back where he started.

FIASCO is an award-winning, GM-less game for 3-5 players, designed to be played in a few hours with six-sided dice and no preparation. During a game you will engineer and play out stupid, disastrous situations, usually at the intersection of greed, fear, and lust. It's like making your own Coen Brothers movie, in about the same amount of time it'd take to watch one.

Author(s): 
Game Type: 
Collaborative Story
Crunch: 
2 - Focus/Imagination
Players: 
3-5
GM?: 
No
Free?: 
No
Excerpt: 

As you rotate around taking turns adding information, eventually you'll have two index cards per player, and every index card will have two dice on top of it -- one for its general category, and one for its specific element. The only rules are:

  • One Relationship between each pair of neighboring players at the table.
  • One Detail attached to each Relationship.
  • At least one Need, one Location, and one Object.
  • The last remaining die is wild, and can be any number.

The first rule ensures you have a circle of interrelated characters. The second rule ensures that everybody has a connection to something cool and colorful (chances are you'll do this anyway). The third rule ensures that you have something to motivate misbehavior, and interesting things to misbehave with and around. The last rule ensures that the final die is actually fun to use.