It is marketed as a "GM-less game for 3–5 players, designed to be played in a few hours with six-sided dice and no preparation".

"[2] Fiasco was the winner of the eleventh Diana Jones Award[3] and has been one of the featured games on Tabletop.

The core rulebook contains playsets for Main Street (small town America), Boomtown (The Wild West), Tales from Suburbia, and The Ice (McMurdo Station, Antarctica).

The things required to play are: The players first select the playset and roll dice (four per player—two light, two dark).

As when setting up the game, these two players each select one group (such as "Tragedy" or "Failure") on the Tilt Table using the values from the rolled, unassigned dice.

Also, along with the new Tilt elements introduced, the biggest difference in Act Two is that instead of giving away the Resolution die, the player keeps it.

[2] In November 2008, Morningstar asked for interested playtesters on the story-games forum,[15] and Fiasco was published by Bully Pulpit Games in December 2009.

But mostly, the dice system works because when you're suddenly ordered to make a scene end 'well' or 'badly', the result is always entertaining."

"[16] Alex Meehan, writing for Dicebreaker, named Fiasco one of the best tabletop role-playing games to play in 2024.

[17] Chase Carter for Polygon listed it as a "seminal" game of the late aughts "blooming of indie RPG designers", along with Apocalypse World, Lady Blackbird, Dogs in the Vineyard and the Romance Trilogy.

... if you despise collaborative gaming experiences and want very traditional RPG mechanics, Fiasco is going to be a poor fit" and noted that "Fiasco can easily venture in to areas that may make certain players uncomfortable and so it's important for people, especially those unfamiliar with each other, to discuss potential limits and taboo subjects before the start of any game.

Players with some experience in improvisation, storytelling, or theatre would get the most enjoyment from it, but many people who have never tried acting or writing before could still have a lot of fun.

"[20] In his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, RPG historian Stu Horvath noted, "As with other storytelling games, it has some points that can be intimidating, particularly the cold open at the beginning, which feels exactly like eyeing up a cold pool to jump into on a hot day — the refreshment comes only after the initial shock — and implementations of the Tilt, which can sometimes feel artificially mechanical."

Horvath concluded, "It's the best sort of RPG — one where the only limits are one's imagination (and, perhaps, one's appetite for comedic cruelty.

It also contains notes and reflections from players of Fiasco including Wil Wheaton and John Rogers.