This week we all gathered round the table for a game of The Quiet Year. It's a game in which you build a community that has one year before The Frost Sheppards come and the game is over, not that the community necessarily knows of its inevitable end. It's a cooperative map building game in which you hold unproductive community discussions, start projects, and discover new things. Each time a decision within the community results in unrest you take a contempt token (shaped like a skull) to denote this unrest.

In the game I played I started two religions and had them fight each other, one worshiping the river (which made sense since our setting was in the desert), and one following a "prophet." We also encountered a non-speaking tribe of tortoise herders who allied with an ex community member who had murdered a large portion of our original community to save the rest of us, and poisoned some unwitting military (looking) men under the guise of a peace offering. We had child scouts/spies, and were an incredibly disorganized lot. It was a very fun game.

Tortoise herders?! Awesome :)

I'd be interested to know how cool the new cards were--I still haven't had a chance to play with them yet.