Our 2024 VILLEINS Annual Holiday FIASCO was a… SUCCESS!
Beginning in 2023, around the holidays, 3-5 intrepid VILLEINS meet to play a game of FIASCO. But not just any game of FIASCO…
We play the traditional, dice-based version of the game, and use the playset “LONDON 1593” which has the setup…
All The World’s A Stage
Elizabeth, Queen of England, has enemies everywhere.
If you can read and write, if you can tell lies with quill or voice, you might have a place as a peddler of bombast, as a player of parts, as a nefarious practitioner of the business of show… or as a spy. For all the world is a stage and the great lords of England and abroad are writing the parts that lackeys, liars, agents, and actors shall play.
Show business and skulduggery are tangled together—here like lovers, there like brawlers—and all those within reach of politics and art must balance their secrets against their ambitions. Love and lust and loyalty are all called into question as poets seek the literature of the age and spymasters seek the enemies of the crown.
Yet for all that the strife of the age claims to be about crowns and kingdoms, so much comes down to the common quagmires of coins and cons, jealousy and greed, love and spite. Petty gripes and dirty designs conspire to determine the fate of England. Some folk may hang or burn and some may slip away smelling of roses.
But, for sure, a reckoning draws nigh.
In other words, it’s right up our dark, Elizabethan alley.
Our studies of Shakespeare and his world are enlivened by our imaginations to create a story together that ranges from the inspired to the absurd.
This year’s game was played by VILLEINS John Rabasa, Jackson Davis, Benedict Burgess, Laura Heck, and Ben Atkinson. It was retroactively titled (by Benedict) “FIASCO at the TOAD’S WADDLE” and it involved a regicidal conspiracy, a disguised double-crosser, a drunk actor freeing a bear from the bating pit under a tavern, and the utter chaos that followed.
Join us in 2025 for another wild adventure!
We may even have to do this more than once a year.
