I’m Jacob Wilson, a human being that’s had the pleasure of playing A Quiet Year.
I wouldn’t consider myself an avid enjoyer of tabletop games, but not a total layman either. I used to be reasonably into Dungeons & Dragons in high school, but not enough that I’d know the minutia of the mechanics. I played it primarily for the banter that emerges once you get past all those horrifying numbers and stats – it’s rather complex, but being able to seduce a lizard man or something makes it worth it at the end of the day.
This plays into (if you’ll pardon the pun) why I enjoyed A Quiet Year. Rather than there being rules upon rules, there are a few, and rules that are rather flexible. Once you learn them, gameplay progresses smoothly. I played this game with my teammates for the tabletop project. They do not have much experience with tabletop games, but they found it easy to get into. The game revolves around drawing cards to tell the story of a settlement before the invasion of the nebulous Frost Shepherds that bring the game to an end.
What makes this game so accessible lies in its partially indeterminate narrative and the lack (or irrelevance) of theatrics that you’d find in other tabletop games. If I had to use fewer zesty words to describe it, though, I’d compare the ease of play to the process of assembling IKEA furniture. You assemble it yourself and at your own pace, and no assistance from any sort of master is required. I’m not nearly as handy as my dad, but let me tell you… I can work an IKEA manual. Similarly, the manual and random story cards give you all the direction you need, which means you need no gamemaster. Instructions for setting up your settlement are simple and clear but also open-ended – the elements of your story will have a defined type, but the exact nature of the element is left up to you, which allows for a lot of possibilities and great replay value. You might define “resources” as anything from apples to quantum engines, and the creative limitations imposed by only partly defining something sparks interesting ideas.
For instance, our group set up a snowy village with a fixation on apples, a frozen lake, and an abandoned McDonald’s… riots ensued when they stopped selling all-day breakfast, and it marks a traumatic period in the village’s history. We also had a dragon in the corner! For that last one, we were asked to define a new discovery, and as instructed by the game, we had a very short conversation about it in which we decided to just leave it be. But we could’ve just as easily tried to slay it with grave repercussions for our hubris. You can make it as serious or goofy as you’d like. The game lets you create characters to inhabit the village, but you don’t have to embody them due to their actions being mostly in the third person and also due to the concise and abstract nature of your interactions with the world. You could imagine yourself as a village’s official, but you could just as easily see yourself as its protective or destructive god. Or “social forces” as the game puts it. This makes it easy for people that aren’t so interested in acting to play.
Generally, a vague ending is not something I like, but A Quiet Year does it well in my view. Even if there is no more to be said about it than “The Frost Shepherds arrived!!!”, you’ll probably have a good idea, based on how functional or dysfunctional your village is, whether you’ll survive that encounter. Even if the game only tells you about the journey, the destination is cleverly implied by whatever your humble settlement gets up to before then.
So, uh, yeah. Quite a nice game if I do say so myself.
