Okay, Boom Town is now two for two for a raucous good time. If you just want bad accents, sexual manipulation and ill-considered violence, this is the playset for you.

Cal Grifton (Sam). Hard-nosed gunslinger with a head for business. Has bargained, blackmailed, murdered and strongarmed his way to the top of the pile, and now pretty much runs his own gold-mining town in California. And if he always wears a dress, by god you'd better not make nothin' of it. Besides, it's going to be a really good dress. Has only two soft spots in his heart, and they're about to roll into town:

Jake Grifton (Morgan), subsequently 'Cougar Man'. Feckless younger brother to Cal, and has been drifting around the West gettin' by any old how. Has somehow managed to survive in the West all his life despite never actually owning a gun and never knowing when to shut up, largely on dumb luck and a positive attitude. Has lately set up a snake oil / faith-healing caravan with:

Belle Featherstone (Jasmine), Cal's old flame from back when they were both very young. (Cal has kept her in his heart all these years. Belle, not so much. It was just one night!) Has made her way around the West any way she can, and no, she won't tell what that meant. Really just wants to get the money and get the hell out of here any way she can. Is vaguely aware that Jake has a thing for her, but really doesn't have much time for either brother.

Four-player Fiasco tends to be a bit more discursive, with a goodly quantity of subplots and secondary characters: in my (limited) experience three-player has been a lot simpler, more tightly focused, every scene ratcheting up the central plot. We didn't really need all of the premise pieces (there was some dynamite that never showed up, the faith-healing thing was only ever background), because things moved along brilliantly without them.

Jake and Belle roll into town, unsuspecting that Cal runs it; Cal tries to groom Jake as his new right-hand man and Belle as his bride, while they scheme to rob him, somehow, possibly. Cal is uncertain of how capable Jake is until, when a shakedown of prospector Toeless Walt turns into a gunfight, Jake gets lucky and saves Cal's bacon. Jake is made the first sheriff of Grifton Town, but Cal's former right-hand-man, actual tough guy Diamondback Jeff, overhears Jake and Belle plotting. Dismissing Jake as a no-hoper, he tries to blackmail Belle into sex; but Belle pre-emptively denounces him to Cal, who puts on his best killin' dress and puts six in the back of Diamondback's head.

Final scene: all along, Belle and Jake have been speculating about robbing Cal's safe, which exists entirely in their imagination. After the wedding, Belle suggests that they consummate the marriage atop a pile of money -- at which point Cal reveals that he has it all invested back East, but he does have a couple of bags of gold dust that can be, uh, sprinkled all over everything. (Least practical fetish ever.) Next morning, Belle escapes through the window, into a haycart supplied by Jake, clutching the gold-dust-encrusted sheets.

Epilogue: Belle and Jake fake Belle's death, leaving her bloody, torn wedding dress to suggest that she was killed by coyotes. Cal buys it, vows to wear nothing but that dress henceforth, and goes to hell, drinking hard, drifting from town to town and picking fights until someone shoots him down in the gutter. Belle ditches Jake at the first opportunity and makes her way East, but the money runs out somewhere in Indiana and she ends up marrying for less money to someone who loves her less than Cal. Jake's dumb luck runs out and he gets his ass kicked for running inept snake-oil cons while acting as his own shill.

So, yeah, this was disturbingly like a Shooting the Moon game, except that nobody got what they wanted.

Awesome fun. The nice thing about the Western setting is that you can do a lot of bad stuff without running straight into Go Straight To Jail / Go On The Lam repercussions, which kind of frees you up to do ill-advised, impulsive things. Or possibly it's just the bad, bad accents. Anyway. Much fun, no real difficulty, awesome players.

Somehow I'm still playing the straight man, though.

Also, holy shit, I just realised that this was my first Fiasco without anything being set on fire. ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED.

Wait, I thought the achievement was to have something set on fire in every scene... maybe I've been doin' it wrong!

Thanks, for the write-up, Sam! It was a super fun game, a lot of great moments. I keep finding myself giggling to Jake's enthusiastic, "Yeah! We could make this a *two* horse town!"