Here, There Are Games

The Quiet Year is a map game. You define the struggles of a post-apocalyptic community, and attempt to build something good within their quiet year. Every decision and every action is set against a backdrop of dwindling time and rising concern. 2-4 players, 2-4 hours.

The Quiet Year

Monsterhearts lets you and your friends create stories about sexy monsters, creeping horror, messy love triangles, and teenage angst. When you play, you explore the terror and confusion that comes both with growing up and feeling like a monster.

Monsterhearts

Perfect, Unrevised is a game about criminals within a Dystopian society. It's about what makes them tick, the crimes they commit, the goals they strive for, and the persecution they may well face.

Perfect, Unrevised

In Ribbon Drive, we create a story about a road trip. Our ultimate goal is to create a thought-provoking, meaningful experience. We let the music guide us. We let the road throw us curves. As our characters, we rethink our attachment to the future.

Ribbon Drive

Games that mean something.

My name is Joe Mcdaldno, and Buried Without Ceremony is my workshop. It’s also where you’ll find Monsterhearts, Perfect unrevised, Ribbon Drive, and The Quiet Year.

How?

I have a few principles that I follow, in my game designs.

My designs are meaningful and thoughtful.
Even the simplest and smallest among them are designed to provoke meaning.

My designs are simple and shareable.
They are easy to teach and can be played within one or two sessions.

My designs are near and dear to my heart.
You can discern my secret self through them.

Why?

I believe a few things pretty seriously:
We are strongly moved by and informed by stories.
Stories unify communities.
Stories reveal who we are.

The beautiful thing is that we don’t owe stories anything, meaning we are free to create them, explore them, deconstruct them and learn from them as we see fit. We are free to draw from them only what we want and need, and to leave them afterward. There is a certain joy to this freedom, which I summarize as a freedom to “bury without ceremony”.

Who?

Who are these games for? They’re for dreamers and thinkers, for people wanting to fasten reins to their curiosity and imagination. They’re for those who play passionately, who take stories by the throat. They’re for gamers, actors, pretenders, explorers and the curious.

They’re for all the sketchy punks who would rather reclaim storytelling than let some impersonal man behind some impersonal screen write their media for them.