Tin Star Games provided Geek Native with a free preview copy of Five Years After, a storytelling game from designer Steve Dee about post-apocalyptic survival with a fascinating and powerful twist: you tell the story in reverse. Based on this early look, it’s a game about loss, memory, and the slow erosion of the self, where discovering who your character truly is becomes the entire point of the journey
The Concept
Five Years After presents a truly compelling premise. Instead of building a story from the beginning, players start five years after a world-ending event, their characters already broken and isolated survivors. The game then works backwards through time in five “Acts”, from Five Years After, to Five Months, Five Weeks, Five Days, and finally Five Hours After The Event began. This reverse chronology is a brilliant narrative device. It means that details established in the “present” (Act One) are recontextualised and given new, often tragic, meaning as their origins are revealed in the “past” (Acts Two through Five). It’s less about winning or surviving and more a collaborative archaeological dig into the characters’ souls to discover what the apocalypse cost them and what single part of them managed to endure.
The Setting
The game encourages players to begin with a familiar “Baseline” setting to provide a solid foundation for their improvisations. By default, The Event is a zombie apocalypse that began in the city where you are playing, on the day you are playing it. The zombies are the slow, relentless “Romero” type, a familiar threat that serves as a backdrop to the human drama rather than the sole focus. This approach is very effective; by grounding the apocalypse in the here and now, it makes the loss feel more personal and immediate. Players are encouraged to think of the people they saw on their way to the game as inspiration for characters, creating a cast of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe.
Character Generation
Creating a character in Five Years After is an exercise in contrasts. Players begin by silently and separately establishing who their character has become and who they once were. This is done by rolling on, or choosing from, tables of adjectives and nouns to generate a concept for the present day survivor (e.g., a “Paranoid Hunter”) and the person they were before The Event (e.g., an “Agreeable Accountant”).
The core of the character, however, lies in six “Characteristics”. Players answer six prompts, such as “What makes you strong?” and “What keeps you safe?”, writing each answer on a separate index card. These cards represent the facets of their pre-apocalypse self, the very things they are destined to lose during play. This process can feel abstract at first, as you define these core traits with very little context, but it’s a clever design that fuels the game’s engine of discovery and revelation.
The System
Five Years After is a GM-less shared storytelling game. The gameplay loop is structured around the five Acts. In each Act, every player takes a turn to create a scene. For their scene, they draw one of their remaining Characteristic cards and describe the moment in that time period where they lost that part of themselves.
In Act One (“Five Years After”), the scenes are solitary, establishing the lonely existence of the survivors. As the story moves back in time through subsequent Acts, the characters’ paths begin to cross. Players will draw cards from a central discard pile, bringing other characters and their (not yet lost) Characteristics into their scenes. This creates an intricate web of shared history, showing how these survivors were connected long before they became isolated strangers. The system is light on rules and heavy on creative prompts, trusting the players to build a compelling narrative together.
Alternatives and Replayability
One of the game’s greatest strengths is its incredible versatility. The book, with design by
Steve Dee and development by Peter Blake, provides a vast toolkit for altering the experience. An extensive chapter details how to shift the baseline away from the zombie apocalypse to numerous other scenarios, including nuclear war, alien invasion, climate collapse, or even a quiet, conspiratorial apocalypse like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Beyond that, the core reverse-chronology engine can be applied to entirely different genres. There are detailed rules for playing a noir murder mystery, a slasher horror film, a disaster movie, or even a grand Greek tragedy. Each variant comes with its own custom character tables, timelines, and scene prompts, effectively making this many games in one. This section is a testament to the robustness of the core mechanic and offers tremendous value and replayability.
Overall
In summary, Five Years After is a standout title that does something truly new with narrative gameplay. The reverse-chronology concept is executed brilliantly, turning each session into a poignant investigation of who the characters were and what the apocalypse took from them. It’s a game that trusts its players to build something beautiful and tragic from the ashes, and the sheer breadth of alternative settings provided shows just how robust this innovative system is. Keep a close eye on this one; while this review is based on a preview copy,
Five Years After is slated for a full release later this year at the earliest and promises to be one of the most memorable releases of 2025.
