Play Report: Cities & Seasons

This play report follows the third playtest/evolution of my hack of The Quiet Year by Avery Alder, which I’m currently calling Cities & Seasons.

Background

On March 23rd Integrate Art Society hosted a sleepover event as part of their program, The Ministry of Counting Sheep. The event — which included those sweet sleepover staples like eating pizza, beating each other over the head with pillows, contacting the dead with a Ouija board, and filling out your literal gossip bingo card — was also an opportunity to celebrate the limited-run podcast series with multiple contributing artists doing sound work you can fall asleep to. You can listen to it here.

I was the artist hired for the event itself and was given more or less free reign to play a game or do some performance work. It came with some constraints, however:

1. There would be approximately 30 people in attendance.
2. I would have approximately one hour, in which I would be The Main Thing.

How do you run an RPG for 30 people in one hour, you might ask? I had no clue but I realized I would probably have to make my own game or heavily modify another to make it work. Either way, I would have to get very crafty.

When my suggestion to run a funnel and kill all the attendants one-by-one was shot down due to not wanting to traumatize children, I thought about the players as a community and returned to this hack of The Quiet Year with the question: “how can I get players to act as a group?”

A Brief Aside, or, What About Playtest #2?

You’ll notice that this is actually the THIRD playtest of this hack. To rewind for a moment, in April of 2023 I ran a second playtest of this hack. I got about halfway through writing the blog post for that play report an then lost interest, which is why you’re now getting a report for playtest #3.

Playtest #2 did alter the game a bit, however, so it’s important to be mentioned here. Here is my WIP draft of my play report for playtest #2:

Changes

For playtest #3, I made much more dramatic changes to the game. This was informed both by learning from the 2023 playtests and also from the design constraints imposed by the event. Let’s run through each:

Make it QUICK

Both the high potential player-count and the short timeframe put strain on one thing: the amount of time a single player actually gets to play. I have run shortened games of TQY before, but even with my one-shot strategies, if I were to play TQY as written, I would be lucky if each player got a single turn. Making things quicker allowed me to solve for both constraints simultaneously; by giving players shorter but more frequent opportunities for active play, they would be able to do more in a shorter time frame.

To that end the first idea (and one offered by the event facilitator) was to group players together and make them act as a single “player” as it were. This was the idea that got me thinking about my hack in the first place because it’s a game about interactions between multiple communities — so what if each team was literally their own community?

To that end I put together some text for the handout about playing as a single entity:

Throughout play we will make decisions that will shape the world and events around us. Some of these will be strategic (Where will be build this route?) Others will be creative (What in this land is sacred?) As players, we each bring unique perspectives and may disagree on the path forward; the only thing everyone must agree on is how we will make these decisions together. Will we take turns acting as “mayor” of the city? Will we put disagreements to a vote? Or will we do something else entirely? Take some time now to find consensus.

To pair with this, I also made a “migration” rule.

This is an open table. You can join a city if you aren’t playing yet. You can move to another city at any time. You can leave when you are done — even if the game isn’t yet.

I, with one of my partners, Alex, also preempted the likelihood of decision paralysis with players being TOO considerate of one another. Like when my family tries to decide on where the 10 of us will have dinner, having too many ideas on the table more often than not slows things down. To support quicker decision making, I altered the content of almost every decision point in the game.

For starters, I wrote 5 starting cities that players were invited to choose from. Of these, only three would be in play. Each city was associated with what TQY calls “details” that form the first marks you make on the map. So the “City on the Water” had a pick list of three specific water features to choose from, plus a fourth “Something Else” option to keep the sort of open-ended imagination that TQY excels at.

I extended that pick list structure to the abundance (now called “resource”) for each city and provided three example resources that each location might have. In a slight of hand, I also added a third pick list for buildings, which is actually an instruction for players to pick a spot for their city on the map disguised as a worldbuilding question. 😈

When it comes to the seasonal card draw, players were once again asked to choose between remaining in the current season or passing time to shift to the next. The cards themselves, however, were all halved. There is now only one event prompt per card rather than a choice of two. I think this actually allowed me to really sharpen up my writing on each card and, although I’ll miss the decision point, I think I want to keep this new tighter set for now.

When it comes to player actions, I removed Discover and Convene for this event. Discover is a little too open-ended, and Convene had the potential to go VERY LONG with 30 players. Instead, I made “Chart a Route” its own action beside “Make a Plan.” I don’t think this ended up producing the desired results, however, and I’d like to revisit this selection in the future.

Make it CLEAR

In TQY, The Week is performed in this order:

• The active player draws a card, reads the relevant text aloud, and resolves it. They follow all bold text.
• Project dice are reduced by 1, and any finished projects are updated.
• The active player chooses and takes an action (Discover Something New, Hold a Discussion, or Start a Project).

What I’ve noticed is that by sandwiching the project dice countdown between the draw and player action, you have this difficult-to-track flow of “active” play. In Playtests #1 and to a lesser extent #2, players would often get lost in the procedure as a result. See if you can follow me in this example of play:

This is all to say, I have had to hold a pretty strong hand as facilitator to keep track of this procedure throughout these playtests. As I’ve iterated, I’ve been trying to minimize this confusion with the turn procedure. In Playtest #2, I reduced the number of steps players have to follow in a turn. In Playtest #3, however, I instead tried to reorder the turn to Action > Draw > Dice — and this actually was surprisingly effective! It seems like shuffling the dice to the end allowed for it to slot in as a kind of “in-between” turns part of the procedure.

I also communicated this procedure by making a flow-chart on my player handouts, which I think helped to ground people in where they were in the turn order and know what their responsibilities were at any given moment.

Make it END

TQY is a game with a fixed duration, but because I wanted a world in motion (and effectively the ability to play this as a continuous “world” game in a campaign), I didn’t want to have a definite End. As a result it was one of the first things I pulled from play. Ever since Playtest #1, however, players have been asking for a bit more finality to the game, and so for this iteration, I pulled some tech from another TQY-based game: The Ground Itself by Everest Pipkin, which ends when all 10s have been drawn from the deck.

In my case, I used aces and termed them Omen Cards. These cards, when drawn, escalate a threat that is always just beyond the purview of the game. They proceed as follows:

• The First Omen: On an ordinary day, something in the world ever so subtly changes, barely noticeable to anyone at all. What is it?
• The Second Omen: Some old folk tale warned us of this. A sign of ill-fortune manifests. Who sees it?
• The Third Omen: The world is wrong. There is something terrible on the horizon. How do we know this is true?
• The Final Omen: The end has come. The game is over.

With the limited time frame for the event, I halved each season’s deck and made sure an ace was still shuffled in there. I figured we might not get them all, but at least we would get one or two, and as a sort of “closing ceremony” I would force the remaining prompts.

Unfortunately, despite getting in quite a few turns, not a SINGLE ace was drawn! As a result I didn’t actually get to test them this time. That being said, I am very excited by the Omen Cards and feel like they do add something special with a little thrill to the draw. Plus, I feel like they fold really nicely into the original design goal of a world in motion.

How it Went

Although I had prepared for all 30 attendees to join the game, I only had 9 or 10 actually join throughout play (which was possibly for the best?) I invited players to start by looking over the available cities, which I had laid out as a time-saving measure. To my surprise, they IMMEDIATELY jumped in to making their cities using the provided steps before I could even introduce the game. While I think this was a great indicator for the imagination that my cities sparked, it did not allow me to frame the ritual of play in a way that made sure we were all on the same page. (I would not recommend trying to introduce the X card to folks who are focused on something else).

Furthermore, because there were still around 20 folks fluttering about, there was actually quite a bit of activity going on around me which I think I, as a facilitator, struggled to project over (I quickly realized no one was hearing me under my mask, for instance, so I had to remove it. Womp womp.) In the future I think I would take a moment to get everyone settled before sharing any of the game material, and maybe explain what I was sharing before handing it out.

Players gravitated to The City on the Water, The City in the Wood, and The City of the Wind. This removed the City at the Summit and the City in the Sand from play.

The whole crew was outside of my usual reach, which was SO great! The folks playing The City on the Water were the closest to a typical playtest group for me. Young adults who maybe have a passing knowledge of RPGs. Maybe they play D&D, maybe they’re completely new to the hobby. They seemed to play closest to how I imagined it, with an interest in understanding the rules and the patience to learn them. They formed an environmental facility on the coast focused on kelp! I believe they chose to resolve conflict by democratic vote, which was funny considering there were two of them.

The City in the Wood was probably the farthest away from a typical playtest group. This group was formed by a few older women, who all seemed just so excited by the “play” and fantasy of the game. They made a little treehouse city in an ancient oak forest and immediately added a river from the City on the Water. This was an example of something that surprised me: both the City in the Wood and the City of the Wind started expanding their cities on the map, drawing off-shoots and other features that interacted with the other cities, even before setup had completed. To resolve disputes, they preemptively tore slips of paper (one said “yes”, the other “no”) and placed them in an empty cup, ready to be drawn in emergency.

The City of the Wind was a surprisingly hyperactive group that I think I could have handled a bit better. This was the only team with children and I really struggled to hold their attention and encourage collaborative play. With the benefit of hindsight, I think bringing some of my past youth program facilitator energy to the table would have helped. Little things like learning everyone’s names so I can call upon them individually would have helped tons.

I don’t think this detracted from the kids’ fun at all, though! Almost the opposite — I think they spun off with uncontrollable enthusiasm for their own ideas. They quickly spun up a wind farm in a valley with a lake nearby and sketched out the logistics of the city before drawing a single card. Everyone was a very good sport about their abundance of energy, though, and helped me out engaging the kids in the social play of it. Also, they decided they would resolve disputes using a competition of rock-paper-scissors, which did get implemented once!

To no surprise, there was a lot of social play to be had as well. The City in the Wood established trade relations with both of their neighbours. The City on the Water focused on their environment and developing a strong, peaceful relationship with the City in the Wood. The City of the Wind evolved from mercantilists to imperialists throughout play and aggressed into other territory.

Animals seemed to become tools of war in this conflict. Ninja squirrels protecting the forest. A ghost megalodon in the sea targeted by a group of ghostbusters. The ghostbusters subverted by tactical espionage otters. Hostile birds sent to fly high above a hardening wall of kelp, only to be welcomed with open arms into a bird sanctuary. A gonzo series of events that most seemed to genuinely enjoy, despite the challenges.

All things considered, I’d count this as a win. It was overall a pretty successful night with lots of laughs and playful moments. I even got some feedback from the event facilitator that the parents passed along their thanks for how I handled the kids, which was just a real treat. The night had plenty to offer me, both as I continue to work on this project, and as I start running games for the public. Hopefully there will be plenty more of these opportunities to come. ❤