Spring: Disclaimer
As a (un)certified Lawful Neutral who abides by “the rules” to an absurd & paranoid & impartial degree, of course I have already gushed about the rules of The Quiet Year in another late-night WordPress piece. So, if you are reading this review with no conception of how “the best card game to ever emerge from a burlap sack” operates, do consider reading the (Don’t Fear) The Reaper prog blog post first—specifically, Phase 1. After all, I’d like to make like my beloved ninth-grade English teacher and economize my yapping & not repeat things over and over and over again like the for loops in my data science homework.
Summer: Jazz & How to “Review” Things
My first draft of this review was a voice memo, perhaps meant to replicate the improvisational, off-the-cuff nature that’s native to many a tabletop roleplaying game. And perhaps to also replicate the “conversational and subjective” rhetoric of Roger Ebert’s movie reviews because I enjoy reading them & want to role-play as a game-enjoying version of him for a bit.
Back to the voice memo. In one of the most annoyingly meta moves that the link between my brain & mouth has ever made, I started talking (impromptu!) about my previous experiences with improvisation, none of which have anything to do with TTRPGs—at least on the surface. Like Barry B. Benson of Bee Movie infamy, I do indeed like jazz. And one of the best things I’ve heard about jazz comes from Charlie Parker of Bebop renown: “First you learn the instrument, then you learn the music, then you forget all that shit and just play.”
The instrument is TTRPGs as a whole. The sheet music is the rulebook of The Quiet Year, which calls out to us the “starting notes & chords” for our journey. Through lore (textual content) and design (visual style), players get a good sense of TQY’s “[earthy?] vibe” (one of Eren’s favorite words), and our job as players is to respond to that vibe with some metaphorical music of our own! And as we get lost in the jazz of responding, we “forget and play.” And, in my play session with Yiming and Andrew, wow—did we do a lot of good-faith forgetting.
Autumn: Are We Playing This Right?
I’ll be perfectly honest: most of the time, I feel like someone who just doesn’t know how to play games. When it comes to playing the instrument of the TTRPG, my biggest accomplishment is connecting two notes together. The rigidities from the board/card game unit—“you have to do this on your turn, you have to do that on their turn, etc.”— are still stuck to my skin. Also stuck to my skin are thoughts like “I’m not understanding this game properly,” or “I’m not interpreting this game’s meaning properly.”
I think all those notions are sort of thrown out the window in certain cases, and The Quiet Year is definitely one of them. My (Don’t Fear) The Reaper group all left our TQY play session wondering if we interpreted the game’s message the way it wanted us to interpret its message. The more I thought about it, the more I thought, “YES.” I think the most beautiful part of The Quiet Year is that one sentence from the rulebook that essentially tells the player, “Hey, you don’t have a lot of time left, but you’re in a community, and you’ve got…you can make something of yourself.” “Of yourself” is the key word here. Be weird and be bold and make Patrick Jagoda, a man you’ve never met before, lord and savior of every food truck in Hyde Park. Yes! Yes. Now, in the words of 22 from Soul, you’re “jazzing!”
Winter: Goodbye, thank you for reading! —Sanaiya
Link to the (mostly!) unedited transcription of my Voice Memo review of TQY (which, much like our TQY map/blog featured image, is—hopefully—pleasantly all over the place)
