The Quiet Year
CoreBest For
Groups who want to collaboratively build a community's story through map-drawing: 52 weeks of discoveries, projects, and tensions before everything changes.
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).
There are no dice and no GM. A deck of cards prompts a community's year week by week as players map and answer them.
- Free to tryNothing freeNo free rules or starter
- Get it nowSold newIn print or as a legal PDF
- –IndexNo back-of-book index or page-keyed reference tables
- ✓GM guidanceA chapter on how to run the game
- ✓Examples of playRules shown in action at the table
- ✓Quick referenceCheat sheet or summary tables
- –Cross-referencesRules rarely point to each other by page
3 of 5 book tools found in the core book
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
Rules license Proprietary
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