The Quiet Year is a map-drawing tabletop role-playing game published by indie game publisher Buried Without Ceremony in 2013 in which players collaboratively create maps to drive a central story of survival.

The game provides the rules and a deck of 52 cards. The players must provide pencils or markers for drawing, as well as paper and six-sided dice. There is no gamemaster.

In a post-apocalyptic setting, 2–4 players represent not individuals, but parts of a community that has just barely survived a crushing winter. The players must "describe the everyday activities of a small community of survivors", planning how they will rebuild and prepare for the next winter. The game lasts 52 turns, each turn representing one week, each turn taken by one player. The passage of turns is marked by a deck of playing cards where the suits each represent a season of the year and each card represents the arrival of certain events such as bad news, changes in luck and project delays.

Each turn starts with the description on the relevant card. The active player then chooses one of three possible actions to do:

Conversation is strictly limited by the rules. As critic Adam Dixon noted, "Most turns only one player gets to speak; a few sentences about what has happened that week, describing places, events and people. These limits mean you can never describe anything fully, creating a void other players can add to."

This can create frustration in the game, and disagreement can be expressed by taking Contempt tokens, which have no mechanical purpose but symbolize the difficulty of community decision making. Adam Dixon pointed out, "The clever thing about the contempt mechanic is that it has no hard mechanical impact on the game. It has no effect on the community, the map, chances of success; its effect is purely social. It's a way of indicating feelings that you can't talk about, if it changes anything it's how the players interact."

At the end of the turn, another card is drawn, and the next player becomes the active player. The game ends with the final card, the king of spades, which represents the arrival of the mysterious Frost Shepherds. The card asks, "When the Frost Shepherds arrive, does our community survive?" The players then must make a decision. Critic Adam Dixon noted, "The answer, usually, is no."

Avery Alder created The Quiet Year, and it was published as a boxed set with a 32-page rulebook that was published by Buried Without Ceremony in 2013 with illustrations by Ariel Norris and Daniel Jimbert.