The Transition Year Wins The Best Adaptation Award!

The Transition Year, our reimagining of Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year, won The Best Adaptation Award for the game jam Applied Hope: The Solarpunk & Utopias Jam! We started thinking and talking about making this game back in May 2021, and the Applied Hope game jam was just the impetus we needed for collective members Hermione Banger and Casey O’Donnell to really sit down and make a first draft of the game. Since then, most of our meetings at the collective have been about edits to this game and adding some new mechanics to it, which we are eager to start playtesting and refining. We’ll be looking for more playtesters soon, so don’t forget to subscribe to our email newsletter (bottom of this page) if you’re interested in helping us playtest!

We want to thank Sad Press Games and vagrant ludology for hosting the best game jam we’ve been in yet and their glowing review of the game:

“After reading the Applied Hope entries, it felt like the most famous RPG of all time was no more Dungeons & Dragons — it was Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year. If you don’t know The Quiet Year, it’s a just breathtakingly beautiful game, all about community struggling to build and to cherish, in the slender between apocalypse and apocalypse. Affinity Games’s The Transition Year stays unabashedly close to its source material, but the many shifts and nudges show great sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and maybe even something that answers to our kinda grand title, “Applied Hope.” The Transition Year is a game of anarchist post-capitalism in shadow of the ruins of extractive infrastructure. We believe it also has the potential to be a challenging game, inviting players to explore some big themes in the interplay between individual, affinity groups, and wider collective community.”

The game jam has some amazingly creative (and hopeful!) games, please check out the other award winners and all the games submitted to the jam. We’ll be playing these and learning from these games for a long time to come.