I played the Quiet Year for the first time last night.  Overall, I was very pleased with it.

Quiet Year is a pure story game, there's basically no portraying of declared characters, even for a short time (as there is in Microscope).  The game is about a year in the life of a battered community: the game encourages you to pick someone isolated, away from the mainstream.  The community has it hard recently, and this is a quiet year, as such things go - a time for rebuilding.

I wasn't at all interested in the concept, it sounded a bit dull to me, but a friend of mine whose judgement I trust has been dead keen to play, and so when our current GM had a night off, we indulged him.

Play is based around a map, which you add to as the game progresses.  As with Microscope, the game has a very firm procedure for how the world (which is just the community and its surrounds) evolves.  The procedure is solid, and while it's a little alienating to someone used to full control of a world-building setting, it's what makes it a game and not just a rambling discussion between would-be GMs writing history together.

On your turn, you can either announce that the community makes a discovery (which you explain) or begins a project of some sort (e.g. to reinforce the walls, to find better fishing grounds, etc.).  In either case, these are noted on the map.  Alternately, you can ask for a 'discussion' - you pose a question, optionally stating your point of view, and then each person gets to make one statement in turn, ending with your closing statement.

On your turn, you decrement the counters associated with projects already underway.

A deck of cards provides random events, with the neat trick of each card representing one of the 52 weeks of the year.

It's a very simple game, but as time grew on I began to feel a strong sense of connection to the place - by the end I really loved our little nordic fishing village.  It achieved a sense of shared aliveness, a sense of history that everyone at the table knows, in a very brief time.  By contrast, most of my "I make the world and you play in it" campaigns only reach this point after quite a few sessions.  (Moment-by-moment gameplay in an RPG is of course more textured, which feels like a slightly different thing.)  All of us agreed that, like Microscope, this felt like a very cool way to create a setting for an RPG.

Something unexpected happens during the game, which is that the players become a proxy for the community members.  Like them, we care about it, because we made it.  Like Microscope, there's a general ban on chatting about the events of the game - if you want to discuss it, you have to start a discussion!  (This is one reason why the terse statements you make are infused with so much meaning.)

There's a constant see-sawing between hope and sadness; plans are set in motion, but then there's a setback.  I felt like a community member, whose will and perfect hope for the place I care about is mostly limited by my ability to communicate with everyone and get my point of view across, and by the machinations of randomness.  Why did poor old Torq leave to be eaten by wolves?  Why did the smith, who had started so many useful projects, have to be in the mine when it collapsed?  Why?!

My one disappointment with the game is that it just... ends, there's no real attempt to provide any closure or epilogue (in the way that Fiasco does).  I can savor a good cliffhanger (

Spoiler

e.g. the ending of the movie 'Limbo' was delicious

) but this just felt like I'd missed the season finale - the stakes are rising.. then.. cut.

I've played a couple of times and had fun. You do have to be cool with the lack of any way to control tone, and be willing to just accept player contributions and roll with things.