Apocalypse World vs The Quiet Year
Compare Apocalypse World and The Quiet Year side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Apocalypse World | The Quiet Year | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Post-Apocalyptic | Post-Apocalyptic |
| Play Style | Narrative, Rules-Light, Collaborative, Improvisation, Low-Prep, Drama, Theater of the Mind, Roleplay-Heavy, Playbook-Driven | GM-Less, Worldbuilding, Collaborative, Narrative, Rules-Light, One-Shot Friendly, Fiction-First, Map-Drawing |
| Core Mechanic | Roll 2d6 + stat. 6−: MC makes a hard move, 7–9: succeed with cost or complication, 10+: full success. Playbook moves trigger from the fiction. The MC follows Agendas and Principles instead of plotting. | No dice, no GM. A deck of playing cards drives play — each suit is a season, each card a weekly prompt. On your turn, draw a card, answer the prompt, and choose to Discover Something New, Start a Project, or Hold a Discussion. Draw on the shared map to represent changes. Projects take multiple weeks to complete. The Contempt Token signals when a player feels unheard. The game ends when the Frost Shepherds arrive (King of Spades). |
| Dice | 2d6 | Diceless |
| Complexity | Low | Very Low |
| Accessibility | Medium | High |
| Community | Medium | Low |
| License | CC BY 4.0 (Powered by the Apocalypse) | Proprietary |
| Cost | $$ | $ |
| Publisher | lumpley games | Buried Without Ceremony (Avery Alder) |
| Year | 2016 | 2013 |
| Best For | Groups who want raw, character-driven post-apocalyptic drama where the fiction leads and the MC never plans ahead. | Groups who want to collaboratively build a community's story through map-drawing — 52 weeks of discoveries, projects, and tensions before everything changes. |
| Highlights | Genre-defining design that launched the entire PbtA movement, playbooks with built-in dramatic hooks, MC framework provides detailed GM guidance, highly hackable | Card-driven structure — one card per week across four seasons — paces the narrative through 52 turns, map-drawing produces a physical artifact of the session, Contempt Token mechanic signals when a player feels unheard, works as a standalone game or worldbuilding tool for other campaigns |
| Considerations | Can feel directionless without strong character flags, 2nd edition layout is dense and hard to reference, move trigger ambiguity requires frequent MC judgment calls, harm mechanics can cascade quickly | Contempt mechanic can create genuine inter-player tension, no way to revisit or undo earlier map decisions, map quality depends on group comfort with drawing, limited replayability with the same group |