Playing games with kids is a different sort of thing than playing with adults... neither better or worse, but definitely different. I played The Quiet Year for the first time since reading it, and it was a fun game for two or three hours.
The game is described thus:
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.
For our play-through, there were two adults, and two children, ages eight and ten. Our community was in an oxbow bend in a river, with a marsh to the south, and a volcano to the north with a jungle at it's foot. Our resources were farmland, fresh water, gold, and trainable animals. Trainable animals were a kid addition which I think was interesting. We played an abbreviated game, removing about half the number of cards for each season. Nonetheless, we still had a full game with a full story, and as it played out, we discovered a village of outsiders some distance to the southwest who kept a mine with a giant monster imprisoned in it, and had built a ziggurat to worship in, a giant wheel at the edge of the marsh fallen in the mud, and flowers with miraculous healing properties on the slopes of the volcano. The jungle had a legend of a monster in it as well, and we built a farm, a dam, a school, a ferry across the marsh, and a place to train more animals. by autumn, we had our woodcutter murdered by the "mingo kids" who were suspected to be from the outsider's village, giant strange tracks in the woods from the southwest, and a fence break that let our animals out. Our dam broke, our farm flooded, and we were preparing for war with the outsiders suspecting them to be sacrificing humans to the monster. One of our own betrayed us to goblins in caves northeast of us, and a flood destroyed our village at the beginning of winter. As the outsiders, and their monster approached us from the southwest, the goblins marched on them from the northeast, and the girl who betrayed us to the goblins betrayed them, and let us in to take their caves. Just as the combined forces came near, the game ended with the frost shepherds freezing them all, leaving us warm underground in the goblins home.
The game was an interesting mix of creative gonzo from the kids who added such elements as the monster in the mine, the trained dogs and cats, the murderous "mingo kids" (who we never really understood), and the goblins. We adults kept trying to bring logic back to the story by connecting hooks that had already been introduced, like the outsiders worshiping the monster in the mine with sacrifices, the dogs being trained to hunt and for war, and the traitor being a double agent that saved us in the end from the ravages of winter just in the nick of time. I think the best thing about playing with kids, is that you allow yourself as an adult, permission to be more open than you would otherwise with sheer logic.
The story was not stellar, but it was fun. It definitely was full of ideas that could be something more, and that is why I love games as the creative spark for storytelling.
