The Quiet Year

The Quiet Year is a fantastic game by the fantastic Joe Mcdaldno that I had a chance to play at Fabricated Realities recently.

Joe's Game Description:

"The Quiet Year is a map game. You define the struggles of a post-apocalyptic community, and attempt to build something good within their quiet year. Every decision and every action is set against a backdrop of dwindling time and rising concern.

The game is played using a deck of cards – each of the 52 cards corresponds to a week during the quiet year. Each card triggers certain events – bringing bad news, good omens, project delays and sudden changes in luck. At the end of the quiet year, the Frost Shepherds will come, ending the game."

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Even though the game is still living in Play Testing Land, and despite the fact that the text is guaranteed to change, I was inspired to make my own custom deck of cards for play.

Why was I so inspired?

Because Joe writes (some of my favorite) lovely games, with lovely text.

Because I have been looking for a post apocalyptic game that has the potential to create an emotional pull, to carry the weight of the reality of what the end of days could be like, and I think this may just be the one.

Because I love me some arts n crafts projects!

So. I established a handful of artificial constraints at the outset.

1) I could only use old copies of National Geographic to find images

2) Each Suite represents a Season, and as such, I tried to find images that would, in different ways, provoke a feeling of those Seasons.

3) I could not reference the game text when choosing images- the goal in this was to hope that some of the images would *magically* correspond to the text once the deck was finished. The only exception was the King of Winter: that image, I chose specifically for the game-ending card

4) Limited images of people

5) I tried to select images that wouldn't influence game-play choices other than by being evocative of the seasonal shift, and the concept that this game takes place post-civilization. I haven't had a chance to play with this deck yet, so we will see how well I did at accomplishing that ideal.

Okay! Photos- I only took photos of the images that seemed to align themselves really well with the text. If you'd like to see the whole deck, we'll just have to play together someday!

Cover: This image is for the box I keep the cards in

This was text from an article in a National Geographic about the Andes. How kismet!

Spring:

Summer:

Autumn:

Winter:

Thoughts? Comments? Questions?