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Rishi A.
United States
Alexandria
Virginia
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Earlier this week, I played one of the most fun games of Fiasco that I've experienced so far. Most of us had played before, but we had one new player so we used the "Tales From Suburbia" playset from the book.
For lack of a better term, we had two "white trash" characters in the game: Eustus and Wheeler, despite the fact that we generally tried to keep up with the upper middle class suburban setting. Eustus was a church-going fanatical Christian who was dim-witted and tried to atone for his past sins in fairly questionable ways. ("The drugs were to help me get closer to Jesus. You know communion wine? This was communion LSD.") Wheeler was trying to get out of a blackmail situation for something that had happened in the past - though the details were never fleshed out, it was certainly the murder of some kid, possibly accidental. Rounding out the characters were Preston, a spoiled rich kid in his early 20s who was also involved in the murder and Detective Kowalczek, who ran a crystal meth operation along with Preston.
One of my favorite elements was an unsavory object of "100 feral cats" between Preston and Wheeler. We decided that the cats didn't belong to either of the characters who it was connected to, but they were being blackmailed for the murder by the woman who owned the cats. The scenes with the woman were a lot of fun, and one of the scenes was punctuated with screeching cat noises courtesy of a smart phone.
The other element that was really fun was the need between Detective Kowalczek and Preston of getting even with "those dirty immigrants" - who we decided were competing Canadian drug dealers.
The game culminated in a shootout at the Canadians' house, set against the backdrop of the fallout from Eustus blowing up the meth lab with a purifying fire.
There were a few reasons that I think I really enjoyed this game in particular. We had a blast with a relatively mundane playset. In fact, the most unusual element did not dominate the entire game. When I picked "100 feral cats," I was slightly worried that they would overshadow the rest of the plot. But, although there were references to the cats throughout the game, they only dominated two scenes - enough to make it fun, but not enough to derail the whole thing.
Finally, I think it goes without saying that the game really does get to be more fun every time it's played. The hallmark of any great game is its replayability and Fiasco has that in spades.
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