Improvisation and “Fiasco.” Two great tastes that go fabulously together! (Part 1.)

I’m Andy and as you probably know I love improvised comedy and drama.

But I can’t perform improv all the time!
However I am happy that there is a lot of other stuff I can do, to scratch that creative itch.
Right now I’m going to tell ya about one of those things…

Recently I discovered a game called “Fiasco” written by Jason Morningstar and produced by Bully Pulpit Games.

I think  this game is fantastic! I love the style of cinema it emulates (more on this below), and in my opinion, the game itself is a masterpiece of design elegance. Using a very simple system it encourages people to sit around a table and tell great stories. This game is a wonderful way to introduce folks to improvisation and creative storytelling, and fun, easy way for those familiar with improvisation to test their creativity and polish their skills.

First I’m going to describe the game a little bit so you can get an idea of what it’s all about, then, as an example, I’m going to break down a game some friends and I had. At each step I’ll try to describe exactly how the game encouraged improvisation, so the improv folks can get an idea of how smart and useful this game can be.

Rather than explain it myself I’ll give you the opening elevator pitch from the game itself:

Fiasco is inspired by cinematic tales of small-time capers gone disastrously
wrong – particularly 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 collapse into 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.

Just to get it out-of-the-way I am not affiliated with Bully Pulpit Games in any shape or form. I’m just a fan pure and simple.

The game needs three to five people and takes about two and a half hours to play from start to finish.

Fiasco is not like most traditional games. The goal of the game is for the players to work together to create an entertaining rollercoaster ride of mishaps, calamity and catastrophe. There is no winner, in fact failure is encouraged!

The best games are when together the players create as much havoc and heartbreak as they can before their characters die/go to prison/become famous!

Note the outcomes are unlimited as your imagination, the game is not restrictive in any way. These are just three possibilities that I picked to give you an idea of what may be involved.

Getting Started:

Every story uses a playset. Think of the playset as the setting. It’s the thing that sets the time, place and atmosphere of the game you are about to play. A playset is a collection of relationships, wants, objects and locations that make a story. These are a key part of the appeal of this game. Just flick through a playset and the ideas and situations leap out at you.

Each playset is geared towards a specific time and place and many emulate established cinematic genres. To get you started there are four playsets included in the core rule-book:

• Main Street. (In a nice Southern Town).
• Boomtown. (In the Wild West).
• Tales From Suburbia. (In a Suburban Community).
• The Ice. (In McMurdo Station Antarctica).

But this is just a start. There are many more available, and they cost you nothing!

Apart from the 4 in the rulebook every month Bully Pulpit publishes a new playset for you to download free of charge. (You don’t even need to sign up to anything).  If you go to their website you can find 18 more straight away. Don’t forget there’s a new one every month!

You can find those playsets here: Fiasco Playsets.

So one afternoon I sat down with my new friends Tom and Adam in Cardiff, and we decided to have a game of Fiasco.

We used the playset “Manna Hotel” a Fiasco playset written by Dan Puckett.

The Manna Hotel is three miles north of Manna, Kansas, population 1,200.
The Manna Hotel is a twenty-room motor lodge with its own in-ground swimming pool, now unused. The hotel burned down and was rebuilt in the fifties. Wood paneling and window-unit air conditioners were installed in the seventies, and it looks like that’s the last maintenance anyone did to the place.
Business has been slow ever since they moved the Interstate, so ten of the rooms are closed all the time now. The other ten rooms are rented and cleaned by a manager who lives on the premises.

A game of Fiasco has five stages:

• The Setup.
• Act One.
• the Tilt.
• Act Two.
• The Aftermath.

So we sat down and got started:

1. The Setup.

Together we rolled a pile of white and black dice into the middle of the table. There were four dice rolled for each player, so in this example we rolled 12. We used this pool of dice to select elements from our playset. Each time an element was picked that dice was removed from the pool.

First we needed a broad relationship between each of our characters, then a detail which gave that relationship a bit more specificity. Then we picked a need, a location and an object to be associated with each relationship and finally a specific detail for each.

Not sure what’s going on yet? Don’t worry hopefully it should become clear…

Please remember we did not have free reign over our choices! We could only make choices that corresponded to the numbers on the dice we rolled.

[If you would like to see what options we had, you can take a look the Manna Hotel playset by downloading it from the link here.]

 Taking it in turn we established the following:

• Tom and I were linked by Crime.
• Adam and I were linked by Romance.
• Adam and Tom were linked by Family.

(After this 9 dice remained in the pool)

Going around the table once more we added the following:

• Tom and I were linked by Crime. The detail was: Blood brothers in the Kansas City Mafia.
• Adam and I were linked by Romance. The detail was: Loathing(!)
• Adam and Tom were linked by Family. The detail was: Siblings.

(At this point 6 dice remained in the pool).

Already we were starting to get an interesting idea of who our people could be.

Now one relationship would get a Need one relationship would get an Object and a final relationship would get a Location.

• Tom and I were linked by a Location “Nearby”.
• Adam and I were linked by a Need “To get out…”
• Adam and Tom were linked by an Object “Untoward.”

(After this we were down to our last 3 dice.)

Interesting stuff but we still needed the final details to nail that stuff down. Going around the table for a final time, we used up the last dice and discovered the following:

• Tom and I were linked by the Location detail of : A clearing in the woods, with a fire pit and a makeshift altar(!).
• Adam and I were linked by the Need detail of : “To get out…of these handcuffs(!!)”
• Adam and Tom were linked by the Object detail of:  “Seven dried ears on a dirty string (!!!)”

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