The Quiet Year is a map game. You define the struggles of a post-apocalyptic community, and attempt to build something good within their quiet year. Every decision and every action is set against a backdrop of dwindling time and rising concern.
For a long time, we were at war with The Jackals. But now, we’ve driven them off, and we have this – a year of relative peace. One quiet year, with which to build our community up and learn once again how to work together. Come Winter, the Frost Shepherds will arrive and we might not survive beyond that. But we don’t know about that yet. What we know is that right now, in this moment, there is an opportunity to build something.
The game plays through a year of relative peace for a small post-apocalyptic community. Players take turns playing through weeks in this year. Each week, the active player draws a card from the top of the deck (which represents the year), and reads the card. They carry out the actions or answer the questions that are specified on the card. Once the card is resolved, some quick upkeep occurs: projects that the community has in motion get closer to completion. Finally, the active player picks an action from a short list: hold a discussion, make a decision, discover something new.
The three actions give players a meaningful and difficult set of choices: do you spend time listening to others, in the hopes that they'll listen to you in kind? Do you pursue your own goals, ostensibly for the good of the whole community? Do you focus inward or outward?
The game is played using a deck of cards – each of the 52 cards corresponds to a week during the quiet year. Each card triggers certain events – bringing bad news, good omens, project delays and sudden changes in luck. At the end of the quiet year, the Frost Shepherds will come, ending the game.
- Uniquely creative activity
- Closer to board game than RPG
- Great for collaborative storytelling
- Used successfully to build Star Wars campaign setting
- Community preparation
- Post-apocalyptic
- Collaborative world-building
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- event cards — Cards determine narrative events
- Map building — Players draw map evolution
- Shared Creation — Group decides story outcomes narratively
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- throughout my entire board gaming life I've also been a role player as well and to me the two hobbies have always interconnected and overlapped
- I've always liked board games that tell stories and have always liked a little bit of crunch in my RPGs
- D&D was the game that got me into role-playing games and the reason I'm probably still playing role-playing games
- the best things about shadowrun are the heists you can pull the great missions the Mission Impossible style feeling you get of the game
- when done right it's a darkly humorous incredibly sinister experience combined with just absurdist comedy
- the war was over belief and what defined what was real and that idea was just a great hook
- the investigation system felt better than any other game I've come across because you could spend the time and the energy to succeed
- the Rebel Alliance sourcebook for Star Wars west end games is one of the best RPG source books I've ever read
- I like the game so much that I almost entirely rewrote the rulebook myself
- all of creation is called the symphony and everything is music in some way