The Quiet Year

The Quiet Year is a map-drawing tabletop role-playing game in which players collaboratively create a map to tell the story of a community trying to rebuild in the year after the collapse of civilization.⁹¹² It was designed and written by Avery Alder? and first released in 2013 by her studio Buried Without Ceremony?.⁹ The game is played by two to four participants over roughly three to four hours, without a gamemaster, and centers on the fate of a single settlement rather than on individual player characters.⁹¹⁰ Its publisher describes it as occupying “an interesting space – part roleplaying game, part cartographic poetry,” and Alder has called it the world’s first cartography RPG.⁹⁵

The game’s premise is fixed by its opening narration: the community has just driven off a mysterious enemy called The Jackals after a long war, leaving it with one quiet year to rebuild before the arrival of the Frost Shepherds, whose coming ends the game and may destroy the community.¹²¹⁷ Neither The Jackals nor the Frost Shepherds are explained, and the nature of the collapse, the setting, and the community itself are invented by the players.⁵¹⁷ The prompts and threats are left deliberately vague, so groups have set their communities on post-apocalyptic Earth, on another planet, or in a world menaced by mutant animals or an undead horde.¹⁰

The players adopt two roles at once — representing the community at a bird’s-eye level and caring about its fate, while also dispassionately introducing dilemmas “as scientists conducting an experiment”.¹²⁷ Rather than embodying specific characters or acting out scenes, they represent currents of thought within the community, and named individuals are simply recorded on an index card for later reference.¹²¹⁰

Play

Play begins with the group sketching the local terrain onto a blank sheet of letter-sized paper — the map — each player introducing one detail and drawing it.¹² The community is assumed to number 60–80 members unless the group decides otherwise, and should occupy roughly a third of the sheet, leaving blank space for later additions.¹² Each player then names an important resource such as clean drinking water, food, protection from predators, or a source of energy; the group designates one of these an Abundance and the rest Scarcities, recording them on the index card under headings for Abundances, Scarcities, and Names.¹²⁵ Players are asked to avoid writing words on the map, using symbols and rough sketches instead, so the finished sheet becomes a shared image legible chiefly to those who made it.⁴⁵

The game is played with a deck of 52 cards, one for each week of the year, divided into four suits corresponding to the four seasons — hearts for spring, diamonds for summer, clubs for autumn, and spades for winter.¹²⁵ Each season shifts the tone: spring poses questions about the community, summer introduces nuance, autumn brings decay and strife, and winter is the most unpredictable.⁵ On a turn a player draws the next card, answers its prompt, and then takes one of three actions — start a project, hold a discussion, or discover something new.⁵¹⁰ Projects are things the community builds or repairs, such as a hospital or a cannery; the group decides how long each takes, from one to six weeks, and tracks it with project dice that count down one per week until they reach zero and are completed.⁵¹² The game ends whenever the King of Spades is drawn, so a full winter is never guaranteed.⁵ A shorter game can be played by removing four cards from each suit before play, while keeping the King of Spades and removing the King of Diamonds.¹²

A distinctive rule governs conversation: on most turns only the active player may speak, and other players may not talk or gesture, a constraint intended to simulate the frustrating, imperfect ways real communities communicate.⁴¹⁰ Verbal discussion is confined to the “hold a discussion” action, in which each player contributes only a sentence or two in turn without replying to one another.⁴⁵ Reviewers have described this restriction alternately as “tyrannical” and as “disciplined,” and noted that it forces players into active listening.⁵¹⁰

The game’s signature emotional mechanic is contempt, represented by Contempt Tokens — physical markers a player may take when a decision leaves them dissatisfied.⁴⁶ The rules describe it emotively rather than in absolutes — “if you feel this way, you can take a piece” — an obfuscation that reviewers regard as the source of its expressiveness.⁴ The tokens have no mechanical effect on the map, resources, or outcomes; their function is purely social, a visible register of tension around the table that a player may reclaim if their grievance is later eased.⁴⁵ Later printings shape the tokens like weathered skulls; editions have shipped with either sixteen or twenty of them.⁹⁶

Publication and reception

The original 2013 release was credited to the designer under the name Joe Mcdaldno, later Avery Alder, with design insights from Jackson Tegu and illustrations by Ariel Norris.¹²⁹ A revised iteration was issued in 2019.⁹ The commercial boxed set includes a booklet — 32 pages in the current edition, 40 in an earlier one — a deck of oversized game cards measuring 3.25 by 5 inches, a turn summary card, six small dice, and the Contempt Tokens, packaged in a kraft box or burlap bag.⁹⁶ A PDF edition is sold separately, and Buried Without Ceremony has offered a discount code for buyers living in poverty.¹³⁶ As of January 2022 the boxed set was priced at $51.82.⁶

The Quiet Year won Most Innovative Game of 2013 at the Indie RPG Awards, gathering 34 points ahead of Robin Laws’s Hillfolk and D. Vincent Baker’s The Sundered Land.² Jurors called it “one of the most important games to be written in years” and praised the collaborative construction of its setting, one writing, “I still don’t completely understand why this game works, but man does it ever work”.²⁹ It was reviewed by Gita Jackson at Kotaku?, by Leigh Alexander and the crew of Shut Up & Sit Down?, and by Adam Dixon at Kill Screen?.⁹⁷

Writers have emphasized the way the game builds a sense of community among its players; Jackson wrote that “this game where you describe a small community made a small community out of us”.⁷⁹ A Kill Screen account contrasted its restraint with traditional role-playing design, noting that games like Dungeons & Dragons elaborate rules for equipment and movement but neglect how players interact, whereas The Quiet Year imposes the most explicit rules on talking its reviewer had seen.⁴ Author Patrick Rothfuss? has played it on video, and it featured in the Marielda arc of the actual-play show Friends at the Table.¹⁹⁶

Alder went on to design other indie games including Monsterhearts? and Dream Askew?.¹⁸ In 2016 she and Mark Diaz-Truman? released Deep Forest?, a map game of post-colonial weird fantasy that re-imagines The Quiet Year, set after monsters drive off human invaders and framed as a direct unpacking of the colonialism embedded in many fantasy settings.³⁹ Buried Without Ceremony also published Charted Areas, a supplement created with cartographer Tony Dowler and useful for short convention games.⁹

What is the Quiet Year?Heart of the Deernicorn