Fiasco is inspired by cinematic tales of small time capers gone disastrously wrong – inspired by films like Blood Simple, Fargo, The Way of the Gun, Burn After Reading, and A Simple Plan. You play ordinary people with powerful ambition and poor impulse control.

The start of any Fiasco is in the Setup. You and your friends (3-5 players) will choose one of the playset decks that sounds fun and put it on the table with the Engine deck. That’s all you need to play the game, but we’ll also include a game board and player aid cards to guide you and make sure everyone is on the same page.

Inside the box you’ll get three playsets- Dragonslayers, Poppleton Mall, and Tales From Suburbia. These are some of the most popular and well-loved playsets for classic Fiasco and we think you’ll have a great time with them! You can also back at reward tiers that include Expansion Packs- more info on those in the What’s Included section below.

To create the Setup, you’ll shuffle the playset deck and hand out all the cards to the players. The players will then take turns choosing Relationships from their hand and placing them between any two players, establishing connections between characters.

Once you have the Relationships chosen, you’ll add details to each relationship, including Needs, Locations, and Objects that will all help to drive your story.

Once these connections are in place, each player looks at the relationships on either side of them and determines what sort of person their character must be. The last step is putting together a name from the options on the back of each playset card.

Once the setup is done, you’ll use the Engine Deck to begin playing Scenes in two Acts. Each player will take a turn framing a scene about their character, choosing the setting and determining what their character wants. Other players will join in, offering suggestions and playing their characters. After a minute or two, the other players at the table will decide whether the scene has a Positive or Negative Outcome and give you a card.

Each player will get two spotlight scenes in the first act and two in the second. In between you do the Tilt, which uses elements on the Outcome cards to determine some crazy new twists in your story. At the end of the game, you’ll use the Aftermath cards to determine how your characters’ stories end up, before you describe your final epilogue.