Fiasco is great

With only four of us available for game night this week, I thought it would be a neat thing to try Fiasco.  I figured four was a bit light for a GM driven game but should be great for cooperative play.  I picked up the book at the local shoppe earlier on this spring and it had been sitting on the shelf all this time, so I read it over the week and tried to get a feel for it prior to game night.  I got the idea, but was still hazy on some of the execution and figured I'd do a dry run through following the play example at the end of the book.  Well unfortunately my wife got her foot stepped on by a horse and we spent the evening at the hospital getting it x-rayed the night before the game. I didn't get the chance to do the walkthrough and I wasn't feeling sure I should be introducing the game.  I felt it was likely going to be a ...debacle.

Well everyone seemed open to try it anyway and it was a Fiasco.

Fiasco is a cooperative story generator.  You set up some randomized Relationships, Needs, Locations, and Objects from a thematic playset and then you use these to create characters and perform scenes in a two act play.  As you do scenes you decide to either create the scene or resolve it which is an interesting mechanic.

Great game.  We tried out a superhero playset and got off to a bit of a rocky start.  From my reading of the setup I thought that each player needed two Relationships and we ran out of dice before finishing.  I found the written rules about how you would end up with two index cards a bit confusing and it was a bit of conjecture that there should be only one Relationship each and finally seeing the picture a few pages later solved that.  Its also true that the first scene is hard.  We had a bit of trouble figuring out narrative control and scene resolution.  I also think we probably fleshed things out too much but it started working better the more we played and we had a good time.  The game was fun to play and the story that came out of it was surprisingly fun and complete.  I'll totally play Fiasco again.