Facilitator: Karen Twelves
Players: Karen Twelves, Rosario Estrella, Adrian Vazquez, Sean Nittner
System: Fiasco (The Ice)
McMurdo Station is a slice of America transplanted to Antarctica, with all that entails—we’re here to do science, but we’re also doing each other—a lot—and we’re also doing crimes. Think of an isolated American mountain town and use your imagination. People get a little intense down here on the ice, and tend toward poor decisions, and sometimes it all goes wrong…”
Playing Fiasco with a bunch of amazing improvisers is basically the best thing you could ever ask for… and I got it!
Introducing:
Les Favorite (Rosario), the new and very capable mechanic at McMurdo. He deserved a promotion, he would get a promotion, and he wouldn’t let that lazy, useless, arrogant Segers!
Mercy Digennaro (Karen), the social committee planner for the station, drinking buddy of Les, and would be sleuth.
Voll Frank (Adrian), the conspiracy theorist and logistics planner. He was the one who found the body at Windpeak Station.
Ezekiel “Zeke” Huffaker (Sean), the intern put in charge of research inventory. He idolized Segers who seemed to know everything about everything and was definitely not manipulating him to his own ends. Oh, he was will Voll when the found the body…frozen in Windpeak station with the door left open and the weather stripping removed…
The Plays the Thing
This was full of so many great scenes including:
- Segers secret “shrine” built of hardware from the 1950s including a prized alembic stolen from the research station…and the body they found within.
- Les and Mercy drinking and sharing their mutual resentment of Segers not only getting the credit, but also getting in the way of anything being done.
- Our mysterious Eastern European dignitary who was very interested in the locked room in B-142…and getting left out in the snow because of it!
- All the ways Zeke kept trusting the wrong people and getting left out in the cold…until he was eventually locked in the storage container in B-142 (or was it 143? We kept getting them mixed up).
- Voll hiding his “plans” behind a projector screen that kept blowing in the wind!
- Segers rant about new technology taking the artistry and the craft out of being a mechanic…pining for the glory days of metal in a world of plastic.
- Our terrible terrible outcomes include Mercy picking up on the investigation Voll started, Les getting his promotion, and Zeke becoming a zombie?!?!
What could have improved:
- This was an incredible game but we did make the mistake was not naming the thing that happened (only alluding to what it might have been) so in the end we opted for a supernatural threat to tie it all together. A way to account for all the lose end, but I think if we had made a definitive statement about what happened earlier on (even if it was wrong) it would have had more oomph!
