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First Run: The Quiet Year on the Moon

Back near the end of January, for our last game, my face-to-face group tried something new: A Quiet Year.

Designed and written by Avery Alder.
Design insights from Jackson Tegu.
Illustrations by Ariel Norris.
First released 2013. This iteration 2019.

2-4 players, 3-4 hours, ages 12 up
drawing, imagination, apocalypse

About A Quiet Year 

For those who haven't heard of it, A Quiet Year is a collaborative map-making about rebuilding a community after the collapse.  It uses a standard deck of cards as an Oracle for coming up with thoughts.  From the game's website:

The Quiet Year is a map game. You define the struggles of a community living after the collapse of civilization, 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.

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.

The Quiet Year occupies an interesting space – part roleplaying game, part cartographic poetry.

My First Game

I have to admit, I didn't know what to expect.

We played the accelerated version of the game, had some great laughs, but I think everyone had bought into the premise within the first five minutes.

The four of us had about two hours, so we decided on a fast game.  I read the game text to get things started, and then kept a light touch on guiding the game, mainly to keep things going and to stick to the game's spirit. 

We collectively decided within a minute on a moon base seeing the end of civilization on Earth.  We were into the play loop within two minutes of that.  It took us less than five minutes to get comfortable with the play loop in.

We chose our Our resources were O2, H2O, Al (aluminum,  not AI), and knowledge.   For our starting map, we set up a Habitat Dome, Reservoir Dome, Oxygen Smelting Plant, and Repository of Records.

The Seasons 

The game divides into four phases, one for each season, starting with spring.  In our game's spring we developed character factions (moon born vs. colonists and violent young men vs. productive young women).  The game limits speech, and only allows one outlet to show disapproval, contempt tokens.  Some of us had large piles of contempt tokens in front of us.

By midsummer, we discovered another colony of raiders and some aliens. One of the players decided to make an abstract memorial to lost Earth,  and we were in-game squabbling by the end of summer:

  • I was Predominantly initiating projects
  • Socrates was predominantly discovering things
  • Soddentowel was predominantly stating discussions
  • Gwenchant was predominantly testing boundaries on several levels

I got the impression we were all having fun.  Apparently, I was too invested, as some people thought I took contempt tokens in genuine frustration. 

Players followed the guidance and didn't own any characters or factions. Lots of delightful surprises on multiple levels.   Everyone enjoyed it, and we idly considered using that map as the basis for a new RPG game. 

My Second Game

I ran a second session of The Quiet Year, this time online and with my old post-college group. We had six players including me. 

After surveying Discord deck 'bots and not finding one that would let me specify the construction of a deck, I instead used https://www.wheelofnames.com/ for the deck, which worked much better. We only did eight draws per season to get an expedited game in. The only frustrating part was that I had to do all the "draws" and screen share, which was not how I expected it to work, since it turned out each user of a shared deck got their own instance.  

For our whiteboard, I used https://www.magma.com/. It worked, but, as a collaborative art tool, it might have been more complicated than it needed to be. I tracked projects manually in text, but it would've helped to have something that could handle some sort of count down marker. I need to explore that further. We worked off of Avery's Oracle download, but I read the chapters of the actual book to them to set expectations. I'm not sure if they were just pushing boundaries, or if they were just feeling wacky, because they chose resources of "magical glowing pink fungus", pink floaties, rubber duckies, kegs of beer, lightning, and junked cars.

  • They picked up the game play loop pretty quickly, and it looked like we were going to go over time, but the second week into winter was the arrival of the Frost Shepherds. I started the game playing, but by mid-summer, I realised we were missing things, and silently took myself out of the play loop to act strictly as facilitator.
  •  That helped a bit, because I was basically recording everyone's actions in chat to make sure we weren't missing anything. In part, this was because around a piece of paper, my previous group was able to more easily act on their own.
  • This was exacerbated by the bigger group, and people getting distracted due to family members interrupting. This only became apparent when they missed a detail, but was slightly disruptive.
  • Before I try this again, I want to write a card-bot or maybe an actual oracle in Discord, and I need to explore better tools for "good enough" drawing.
  • They also ignored the "keep the annotations small" bit, and went with a side view map, so things got very cluttered.
  • We managed to play our expedited eight-draw-per-season game within two hours, with winter only having two draws.

Thoughts on Game One

I suspect it's a great game for people who don't play TTRPGs, but are willing to stretch beyond card or board games.  

I also suspect that for a TTRPG group it could be an interesting session 0 activity,  or maybe session -1.  Members of online communities I discuss TTRPGs with have shared their own positive experiences for such a use of The Quiet Year.

It's definitely a fun game to play for people who don't know what they're in for.  I'll definitely keep it ready to try out again, either just for kicks, or with some constraints to use to set up the "home base" of a TTRPG campaign arc.


 

 

 

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