I playtested Fiasco this weekend, which is a game I'm working on that is about fiascos. The idea is to model situations where deeply flawed people are presented with opportunities that are too good to be true, then standing back and watching the disaster unfold. The ur-fiasco is the movie Blood Simple. Ensemble caper movies seem to fit really well.

It was me, Chris (caesar_x from around here,) Matthew (semioticity) and Dan (Not a Story Games luser).

So a small southern town. The action centered around a couple of employees at the paper bag manufacturing plant. They'd been divorced for many years and ostensibly hated each other (although we later learned they were very friendly behind closed doors still). The lady divorcee was the daughter of a creepy old dude who managed rental properties and owned a surveillance company on the side. And the fourth character was a pretty young lady, new in town, working at the plant, with a huge crush on the shop foreman - the divorcee's ex-husband. She was renting a house from the creepy old man. So the circle was complete. Into the mix we threw a property deed, the old dude's extensive collection of surveillance tapes, and his obsessive need to document his daughter's current infidelity. It was a pretty kickin' situation.

This particular game centered on that deed - it was in the shop foreman's name (a wedding gift), but the old dude had been collecting rent for 20 years on the house on Poplar avenue (where the young girl now lived) His daughter was siccing her lawyer on the ex-son-in-law to get her slice of the pie (despite still sexing him on the side - a complicated relationship) and the poor shop foreman just wanted what was his. So it was a crazy situation. Mix in some illegal surveillance - planted by the fresh-faced girl in exchange for free rent - to ramp up the paranoia. Add in a messed-up almost-hookup and some manipulative brinksmanship by the daughter, some crazy and misplaced jealousy, one unsavory sex tape, and pretty soon shit is hitting fan. Quote of the game:

DIVORCEE (To gun store owner): What sort of caliber handgun would I need to kill a little woman?

One dead Mexican gangster, one severed toe, one full body cast, and one deputy sheriff shot in the stomach later, the game had resolved - badly for the divorcee, painfully for the girl and the old man, and very well indeed for the shop foreman ... once he recovered from the car crash. it took a little over two hours and felt pretty solid.

So the game worked well and the problems that came up were big but easily fixed, I think. Matthew even name-checked Blood Simple, unsolicited! The game ran smoothly and was fun to play - probably helped by great players (thanks guys). This was the fourth playtest and I'm really happy with it so far.

I think you'll like it then, Jarrod. There's a built-in pacing mechanism that requires you to build up a mixed body of success and failure until the game's half over, then everything shakes up hard, with successes pushing you toward bad places and failures pushing you toward slightly less bad places for the second half. It's Coen-rific.