Fiasco vs The Quiet Year
Compare Fiasco and The Quiet Year side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.
| Fiasco | The Quiet Year | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Modern | Post-Apocalyptic |
| Tags | GM-Less, One-Shot Friendly, Rules-Light, Narrative, Collaborative, Drama, Fiction-First, Low-Prep | GM-Less, Worldbuilding, Collaborative, Narrative, Rules-Light, One-Shot Friendly, Fiction-First, Map-Drawing |
| Core Mechanic | No GM. Setup uses cards (or dice in Classic edition) to establish relationships, needs, locations, and objects between characters. Scenes alternate between Establish and Resolve: other players either frame the scene or choose its outcome. The Tilt at the midpoint introduces chaos. The Aftermath tallies white and black dice to determine each character's fate. | 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 | d6 | Diceless |
| Complexity | Very Low | Very Low |
| Availability | Free core rules | Paid |
| Runnability | 4 of 5 book tools | 3 of 5 book tools |
| License | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Third-Party Publishing | Not yet researched | Not yet researched |
| Publisher | Bully Pulpit Games | Buried Without Ceremony (Avery Alder) |
| Year | 2020 | 2013 |
| Languages | English, French, German, Spanish | English |
| Best For | One-shots where players collaboratively build and then dismantle a story of desperate people with big ambitions: inspired by Coen Brothers films and crime-gone-wrong cinema. | Groups who want to collaboratively build a community's story through map-drawing: 52 weeks of discoveries, projects, and tensions before everything changes. |
| Highlights | Zero prep, no GM required, playsets define different settings and genres for each session, Diana Jones Award winner, plays in 2–3 hours | 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 | Heavily dependent on player chemistry and group dynamic, Tilt can derail carefully established narrative threads, new players often struggle with self-directed scene framing, outcome quality varies significantly between groups | 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 |