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The Quiet Year

Core
A map-drawing game about community, scarcity, and the passing of seasons before the Frost Shepherds arrive
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post-apocalyptic
GM-LessWorldbuildingCollaborativeNarrativeRules-LightOne-Shot FriendlyFiction-FirstMap-Drawing
Languages: English
DiceDiceless
System FamilyStandalone
Cost$
LicenseProprietary
PublisherBuried Without Ceremony (Avery Alder)
Year2013
Complexity Very Low
Accessibility High
Community Low

Core Mechanic

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).

Best For

Groups who want to collaboratively build a community's story through map-drawing — 52 weeks of discoveries, projects, and tensions before everything changes.

Highlights

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

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