Only played this once so far but i want to do it again. It was a fantastic time and very easy to understand.

A great way of exploring the power of collaborative creativity. The game often evolves in ways nobody could have predicted, interesting links between narrative threads emerge effortlessly, and fascinating stories are easily weaved through play. An elegant and simple rules system that seems to know exactly how well it works.

Additionally, it is excellent as a small scale (large scale with a little tweaking) setting generator for writing or TTRPGS.

I love this game for the different focus of mind it engenders. For my traditional RPGamer friends playing crunchy D&D right over to story Fiasco games, all of them picked this up quickly and appreciated the mostly gentle collaborative description of the game. Those with an artistic bent loved the drawing element of the game - some maps end up works of art, and others have used a few marks to represent what they then describe more in words.

First, a great game for play-by-post if you can figure out a way to draw a shared map.

A game that is both chill and engaging, with conflict that can be dire for the characters but not stressful to handle for the players, with a clear end point and a lot of well-structured freedom.

This is a great GM-less party game for a group of friends interested in worldbuilding and community-level storytelling. The mechanics can be grasped in minutes, and flow beautifully during play.

During your game, all players cooperate to build a "map" of a community in a rebuilding year between hardships. The calamity could be raiders that periodically invade and loot all wealth in the community, or some other problem. Drawing ability can be anything from stick-figure Pictionary-level to detailed naturalism; the drawing all about communicating ideas to each other visually, and their relationship to each other spatially on the map page.

I'd be very interested to play this game through as a "Session Zero" for a longer story game in a different system, using the finished map and events of this game as the basis for adventuring in a world the playgroup all created together.

Beautiful work!

Great game! my group used it to define the village and its surroundings for our D&D campaign. Despite being novices to the more freeform story driven games everyone at the table loved playing The Quiet Year. They wanted to play on when the game finished, and immediately came up with cool alternative settings to try the game in, to play again. As a GM in our D&D game I got a map full of exciting locations to get inspired by, and a shared history of the area that all my players are invested in.

overall; excellent game that nudges players to be creative. Well worth its pricetag as multiple replays are sure to bring out new exciting stories.

Played at PAX and loved it. Purchased because I would love to play it again. My only reason for not giving this a solid 5 stars is that the purchaseable product is formatted as a chart where you can lookup results using poker cards. I would have liked to have seen a printable deck that I could cut out for a more seamless play experience.

I love this game. It's very simple and allows for an insane amount of creativity. It a fusation of board game and rpg, not quite one and not quite the other. I have run this at three conventions as well as for friends and significant others of gaming friends who are not 'into' games and they all had a blast. While people mind find it daunting Rp'ing Grignar the Mage of the Three Spheres of Dawn, its a lot less stressful saying "Uh..the new scarcity is...hammers." and then draw a small hammer with an X through it or deciding that the new danger to the community is "Um...giant..crawfish..are..in the river and attacking our sheep!" and then draw a big old crawfish on the map. There are no numbers or columns and tons of dice to confuse or fret over. The act of drawing and watching things grow and change really draws everyone one.

The game recommends using a piece of printer paper or loose leaf paper, which works fine, for the map. I personally use one of those large wet erase roll up battle maps and a 8-pack of colored markers for all the drawing. It really gets people to be creative with the drawing. At every con most of the players end up taking pictures of the maps.

This is a game for any age bracket and player level. I've had hardcore grognards, 10 year olds and 40 year old mother who have never played an RPG in her life and each one loved it.

Buy this game. It's totally worth it.

I was hesitant to pay for a product that sounded fairly crunch-less, but am very glad that I did! The Quiet Year is a fascinating game of the "Scandinavian role play" style (more broadly descriptive, involving collaborative overall storytelling, rather than taking on identities of specific characters). The rules are very simple and straight-forward, yet allow for infinite creativity of the players and absolutely endless re-playability. I can see this game becoming one of my group's favorites for casual evenings when we aren't in a crunchy mood and want to exercise our imagination more than most other games allow.

I can see grade-school kids playing perfectly well. Many people may not like the fact that there is no "winner" and the game cannot truly be "won" in a sense (although, if everyone in your group wants to play it that way, it is certainly easy to do via the Contempt mechanic). I suspect most skeptics would change their minds should they give it a chance.

Despite being only 14 or 15 pages long with pictures, I feel this PDF is well worth the cost. My only criticism is that the official deck of The Quiet Year cards are kind of pricy ($25 plus shipping, from the publisher's website), but the game works perfectly well with just a regular deck of playing cards.

If your gaming group is social and enjoys cooperative games, I strongly recommend The Quiet Year!

this is a really fun game, but really it seems more like a mental exercise in world building. it's a unique setting with interesting mechanics. things happen in the world, for good and for bad, but you always feel invested in the creation and destruction of the civilization you and the other players create. for the price, it's a steal, and you will get your money's worth. i look forward to playing it again and again.