The Quiet Year

The Quiet Year is a map-drawing tabletop role-playing game for 2-4 players about community building, by Avery Alder. The illustrations are by Ariel Norris, and Jackson Tegu is credited with additional design insights. It was independently published in 2013 by Buried Without Ceremony. The Quiet Year won the 2013 Indie RPG Awards for Most Innovative Game. A new iteration of the game, with larger cards, rules refinements, and extra components, was published in 2019. The game has been featured on the actual play podcasts The Adventure Zone and Friends at the Table.

Gameplay
The Quiet Year combines elements of tabletop role-playing games and board games. It consists of a 32-page rulebook and a deck of cards, and it additionally requires drawing tools and six-sided dice. There is no gamemaster. Players represent parts of a community, managing resources and responding to card-based prompts, all represented by a shared map that they gradually draw together throughout play. The game emphasizes group decision making, with each player choosing whether to hold a discussion, start a project, or discover something new on their turn. Player speech each turn is limited, creating feelings of frustration on purpose. Players can express disagreement by taking Contempt tokens, which have no mechanical purpose but symbolize the difficulty of community decision making. Each turn represents a week across a year of in-game time, after which mysterious Frost Shepherds arrive and the game ends.

Sequel
Deep Forest is the sequel to The Quiet Year. It was co-created by Avery Alder and Mark Diaz Truman, cofounder of Magpie Games. The game mechanics are the same as The Quiet Year, but players represent monsters rebuilding their community in the aftermath of destructive colonization by humans.