I’m surprised that I never came across A Year In… before last week because it’s the kind of game I like to track down. A print and play game that is solitaire friendly, low ink friendly and has a chill theme. It just goes to show that there’s so much out there.
A Year In… is a flip and write game that uses a standard deck of cards. Everything, including the rules, is on one sheet of paper. Sometimes, cramming everything in like that can lead to not enough room to really get the rules across but A Year In… is simple enough that that’s not a problem.
The idea is that you are setting up a village, one that is clearly inhabited by friendly talking animals if the artwork is anything to go on. You have a grid and a couple of tables for landscape features and villagers.
At the start of the game, you shuffle the cards and discard 10 sight unseen. We will get back to why this is important. After that, you flip a card each turn and use the tables to add something to your map.
Each suit is a specific type of landscape feature, flowers or hills or two types of trees. Each rank is a villager, with face cards being a little more specific.
Adding landscape features is simple. You draw the appropriate feature in a square. Villagers are a little bit more complex. They have to be placed in a specific arrangement of landscape features. Having a flower on their right and left for instance. Face cards, not only require significantly more complicated patterns, they also have to match a specific suit as well. On the plus side, they count as three villagers.
There are also three shops. Each one requires a set of four rank cards (that you cross off as you go) before you can draw them in. However, that does give you another way to use cards and each one counts as a villager as well.
After the deck runs out, whoever has the most villagers wins. Ties are broken by rank. If you’re playing solitaire, you just do the best you can.
My wife has been playing Hello Kitty Island Adventures, where potential residents have very specific housing requests. I looked at A Year In… and realized that it was a distilled example of that idea. More than that, I am a big Animal Crossing fan and this game definitely has that kind of vibe.
I was completely unsurprised to learn that it was developed during the Covid lockdown.
Luck plays a huge, pretty much overwhelming, role in the game. You can work towards getting a specific goal, namely, one of those high scoring, face cards, as a villager. However, if it comes out too early in the game or has been discarded during the set up, It’s never going to happen.
And discarding 10 cards at the start of the game definitely increases the odds of your plans not working out. At the same time, if you didn’t do that, it would turn into a card counting exercise, which I think would be a worse experience. Discarding those 10 cards turns it into more of an actual game.
From a mechanical standpoint, A Year In… doesn’t hold up that well as a game. The random factor really makes the control you have an illusion. If you are trying to make a lean, mean, efficient village, you are just going to get frustrated. So there are a lot of audiences that aren’t going to be interested in this game and, depending on my mood, I can be part of those audiences.
But when I am in the mood for some whimsy and drawing a pretty, pretty village of cartoon animal people and don’t mind pushing my luck, A Year In… is pretty nice.
It is not a cozy video game PnP simulation. If you want that, that would be A Simple Life. Which does a really good job of it. And if you don’t want that, print and out play A Simple Life because you will find that you do want that, you just didn’t know it.
A Year In… is a simulation of the _idea_ of a cozy game. It has mechanical issues to the point that you could argue that it is unbalanced, but it does a very good job delivering a relaxing experience that has some actual challenge.
A Year In… is an obscure little game that isn’t for everyone. But if the idea makes you go ‘hmmmm’, it will be rewarding.
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