Eclipse Phase vs The Quiet Year

Compare Eclipse Phase and The Quiet Year side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.

	Eclipse Phase	The Quiet Year
Genre	Scifi, Horror, Post-Apocalyptic	Post-Apocalyptic
Play Style	Crunchy, Horror, Weird, Investigation, Espionage, Faction Play, Open Source	GM-Less, Worldbuilding, Collaborative, Narrative, Rules-Light, One-Shot Friendly, Fiction-First, Map-Drawing
Core Mechanic	Roll d100 and try to land equal to or under your skill (or aptitude × 3 for unskilled checks), adjusted by difficulty modifiers in ±10 increments. The 33/66 rule grades each roll on a single throw: a success of 33 or higher is a superior success, a failure of 66 or lower is a superior failure, and doubles (00, 11, 22, …) are criticals. Four pools, Insight (mental), Moxie (social), Vigor (physical), and Flex (wild card), spend to add +20 to target numbers, flip-flop a roll's digits, upgrade a success, ignore wounds or trauma, or introduce narrative elements like NPCs and environmental details.	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	d100	Diceless
Complexity	High	Very Low
Accessibility	High	Medium
Runnability	Very High	Low
License	Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	Proprietary
Cost	Free (Quickstart) / $$	$
Publisher	Posthuman Studios	Buried Without Ceremony (Avery Alder)
Year	2019	2013
Best For	Groups who want hard transhumanist sci-fi with cosmic horror undertones, dense subsystems for hacking and body-swapping, and the Firewall conspiracy framework where cortical-stack backups turn death into a setback rather than the end of a character.	Groups who want to collaboratively build a community's story through map-drawing: 52 weeks of discoveries, projects, and tensions before everything changes.
Highlights	The ego/morph split separates mind from body: characters back up their cortical stacks and can resleeve into biological morphs, robotic synthmorphs, or digital infomorphs between sessions, making body choice a tactical decision and death a recoverable setback. The 33/66 rule grades each percentile roll on a continuous scale of superior success or superior failure without rerolls, so a single throw produces a degree of outcome rather than just pass/fail. Seven distinct reputation networks (@-rep, c-rep, f-rep, g-rep, i-rep, r-rep, x-rep) replace cash for many transactions in post-scarcity territory, modeling factional standing as a parallel economy with its own favor limits and weekly refresh caps.	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	Bookkeeping splits across an ego sheet (mind, skills, traits, pools, rep) and a separate morph sheet (body, ware, Durability, derived combat stats), and resleeving mid-campaign swaps out the morph half including pool maximums. The book takes an overtly political stance: the introduction states it is "not the game for you" if you support authoritarianism, and faction writeups present anarchist and autonomist values as the authorial baseline rather than one option among many. Routine cortical-stack backups make character death recoverable by design, so traditional life-or-death stakes need to be reframed around backup destruction, exsurgent infection, or memory lack to carry weight.	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