We played Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year (2019 edition) with a group of four. It’s a GM-less map drawing game where the players portray a post apocalyptic community coming from one existential crisis, headed for the next, with a year to build something inbetween. Perhaps it might last.
The players don’t portray any specific character, or even a group of characters. Rather, they’re abstract social forces. You might call them gods, but they don’t feel all that powerful in play.
The game is built around a map the players are all drawing. You can’t write on the map. Every action and decision needs to be reflected on the map.
Community mechanics
The game has three interesting mechanics, shaping the way the community evolves. None of them involve numbers or meters. They’re all about how the players interact, or how they’re prevented from interacting.
At the core is the turn structure: players play cards in turns, and when it’s one player’s turn, the others are a quiet audience. They may not influence the decision making, storytelling, or map drawing of the acting player. This was very difficult at times! Roleplayers naturally want to check in on the table vibe and go in a shared direction, and this game makes it hard. There was a fair amount of telepathic manifestation going on at times when someone was making an important decision. Sometimes it really worked!
When a player feels they’ve been ignored in an important decision, or just generally strongly disagrees with the direction the narrative is going, they can take a Contempt token. These are a pile of small (cute!) skulls. The tokens represent tensions in the community. If the situation markedly improves, a player may return a token. At the end of the game, the players discuss what the tokens represent, and if the community can prevail against the winter. Because this is the only way to express disagreement in the game, the taking of Contempt tokens holds a lot of ritualistic and expressive power.
The only way to ask the community what it thinks about something is to use your one action on your turn to hold a discussion. You get to make a short statement (a couple of sentences) or ask a question. Then the other players go around the table, and each one replies with 1-2 sentences. There is no back and forth. It is forbidden to come to an actual decision. These discussions rarely resolve anything, but rather seed future developments that a player may return to.
How did it go?
We used the fleeting time variant, shortening the game by about 90 minutes. The game ran for an exact three hours without breaks. We’re interested in playing the full length version.
We loved the way the game made us express ourselves in a vulnerable way, as there is no democratic way of deciding what happens next: you have to say what you want to happen next, and draw it on the map. You have to roll with the changes, and often need to come back to your own curveballs.
Just the act of drawing in front of the others in silence is significant. All of us had an art school background and were just stumped on drawing anything that made sense in the moment. At the same time, it was liberating!
Each player is responsible for keeping the game interesting: if things are going smoothly for the community, that needs to be challenged. It felt to me like everyone is a GM, which removed a lot of pressure from me from driving the game. Simultaneously, when you introduce something bad into the narrative, and the other players take up Contempt tokens in response, that feels weird, as you’re playing the game the way it’s supposed to be played, yet the feelings at the table are real, and the tensions in the community mount up.
We realized in the end that everyone had a different idea about what the game world was like – what the limits of the fantasy were. That could’ve been discussed in the beginning for a more focused experience with more confident players.
We didn’t talk about the scale of the map, and found that a markedly smaller resolution would’ve been interesting, perhaps zooming into the level of individual buildings. Or the opposite, zooming way out to the level of countries or equivalent.
We had a really chill time about it, and after the debrief (stars & wishes) proceeded to talk about life until late in the night. This isn’t usual after our games, as typically a game ends in a high, and as the GM I’m spent after 4-6 hours of concentration, and need to wind down in peace. Here it felt like we’d really listened to each other and participated on a level playing field, opening everyone up.
Leave a Reply