We've been challenging ourselves to do one game a month (including hacks/mods of existing games) and have had a prolific summer so far. Our newest project is this hack of Avery Alder's The Quiet Year, a map-drawing ttrpg game where you play the social forces in a small community after the collapse of civilization. We wanted to play with hope, transition, post-capitalist futures, and solarpunk (though more of a solarpunk where we finally have the opportunity to shape change, since we are not longer being worked to exhaustion, not that they are all solved). 

The setting for our version of The Quiet Year is after "the masters" have left and took "the reapers" with them (possibly to space or their bunkers, we're not saying), where the "engines of industry and the state have stopped." It's ambiguous what the state of technology/civilization is in, but the elites of state and industry and the forces of policing and military have up and left, leaving us ordinary people "one quiet year, with which to dismantle or repurpose the tools and knowledge of the past and reclaim a different way of living together." Like The Quiet Year, the ending is also ambiguous, the community may or may not survive, "The masters will send the reapers to take what they want. We do not know who or what will survive this encounter." Perhaps, if we redesign our society in a way that they don't view as "valuable", more could survive this encounter? 

We took a lot of our design from The Quiet Year's kind-of-sequel, The Deep Forest, where players speak for the diverse affinity groups that comprise the community, as they would speak for monsters in The Deep Forest. 

"An affinity group is a closed group made up of  individuals (~3-20) who share a commonality, an  affinity -- this could be a shared interest, vision and  values, or identity (such as race, gender, sexual  orientation, language, religion, etc.). These  individuals work together, support each other, and  work towards a particular mission or goal.  Individuals are often part of multiple different  affinity groups, allowing for cross-pollination  between groups and broader affinities."

We included some ttrpg safety tools like an X Card and a Taste Menu as well. We made some changes to how them map is first sketched, first the terrain is sketched, then establish the nature of the local extractive industry and the lingering impact it has had on the area, and the borders of these effects. Then each player introduces an affinity group and draws it on the map. 

The "Resources" for The Transition Year are a mix of ideological and physical objects---they resources held in Common (or shared by a few affinity groups_ for the better of all, and resources that the community agree should be/use of should be limited (if used at all) for the better of all. We think this models important communal choices of socializing or "commoning" resources and abolishing the use of resources/practices that do not serve us. We also want to forefront player choice here, so every player gets to come up with an option for both common and limited resources, then players choose a common resource from the options players came up with. For the limited resources, players choose one that they don't want to be limited, and keep the rest proposed. 

A  more solarpunk future could have these starting resource ingredients: 

• Common: Solar panels
• Limited: Money, private property, fossil fuels

A more abolitionist future might have these starting resource ingredients:

• Common: Community care
• Limited: Cops, prisons, debt

A more anarchist future might have these starting resource ingredients:

• Common: Ownership of private property (land, capital, machinery)
• Limited: Hierarchy, wage labor, the state

The actions for the week have been altered as well, these are "Name a Group"--to name another affinity group and add it to a map, "Start a Project" to start a project an affinity group (or combination of) will embark on, and "Call a Gathering", which combines aspects of "Host a Discussion" from The Quiet Year and "Agree on Something." We wanted this to look more like a consensus process, were groups can block (disagree), stand aside (be silent) or agree/agree and amend.  

We made this for the SAAM Arcade 2021 Game Jam  and turned it in just in time (with 10 minutes to spare!) for the jam's deadline.  Because of the deadline of the jam, we did not have the time to go as much into modifying these games as we wanted to. So this is just our first version of The Transition Year. We will be making changes to The Oracle and the use of the Contempt tokens (to hopefully give them more teeth) certainly in the future, and other changes as well as we playtest and fine tune the game's design. 

For now, if other's would like to play our first version, we'd love your feedback and to see the maps made during your play! You can send your thoughts and feedback and a pic of your map to us at comrades@affinity-games.com, we'll be collecting the maps sent to us and putting it here and on our blog!