Tonight, for the first time since I picked up Dungeons & Dragons in middle school, I shared my favorite hobby with my dad. He saw me playing D&D with my friends in high school, and while he was supportive, he never had much interest in learning about roleplaying games, much less participating. That all changed tonight when, almost 20 years after I first picked up a roleplaying game, I finally played Fiasco with my girlfriend, my dad, and my stepmother.
As obsessive card players, my dad and stepmom are no stranger to games. I grew up playing Poker and Cribbage with my dad, and we play hundreds of hands of Pinochle each time I visit them. We also play spirited games of Monopoly, Scrabble, and Boggle. Over the years, we’ve played a lot of games, but we just haven’t played any roleplaying games.
So it was with cautious optimism that I sat down with my girlfriend, my father, and my stepmother last night to play Fiasco. They’re both movie buffs who enjoy the Coen brothers’ films, so I tried to explain the concept in cinematic terms: we would be, collectively, the writers, directors, cinematographers, and actors in a Coen brothers movie set in the Wild West. We would use dice to determine some details, but all of the decisions were ultimately in our hands in a directed improv style. Not quite sure what we getting ourselves into, we embarked on our journey.