My Five Year Almanac - A Solo Print & Play Farming Game

Welcome to My Five Year Almanac

Build a homestead. Watch the seasons change. Keep the story of the five years you spent there.

My Five Year Almanac is a solo print-and-play farming game about turning a mostly untouched piece of land into a homestead of your own.

Across five in-game years, you'll plant crops, gather resources, build paths and irrigation, improve your farm, and help shape the nearby town of Meadowbrook. The seasons will bring changing weather, opportunities, and decisions about what your homestead needs most.

But this isn't just a farm you manage.

It's a farm you create.

Your Almanac becomes the record of those five years—the choices you made, the land you developed, and the little place that became yours along the way.

Make the Homestead Your Own

When you first arrive, much of your Homestead is blank.

That's intentional.

You'll draw your own farmhouse, decide where your crops grow, lay paths, extend irrigation, develop your woods and quarry, construct buildings, and gradually fill the land as you play.

The game gives you the rules. You decide what the place looks like.

You don't need to be an artist. Your farm can be carefully illustrated, filled with tiny doodles, represented with simple symbols, or just kept in pencil. The Almanac is meant to be used and not kept pristine.

As the years pass, those marks begin to tell the history of your farm.

There is no wrong way to keep an Almanac.

Ten Days at a Time

Each active season—Spring, Summer and Fall—lasts 10 days.

At the beginning of the season, you'll shuffle its own 17-card Almanac deck and set aside 10 cards without knowing which ones you've drawn.

Each morning, reveal the next card.

Maybe it's a beautiful day that's perfect for building. Heavy rain might uncover extra stone. Wind may bring down useful branches. Fog might hide a small surprise.

Or maybe it's simply hot, cold, humid, gray or a miserable day for hayfever.

Then it's up to you to decide how to spend the day.

Plant crops. Prepare soil. Gather resources. Build paths and canals. Work toward a new building. Visit Meadowbrook. Save your harvest for something bigger—or sell it when the market is in your favor.

You won't see every Almanac card every season, and you won't have enough time to do everything.

That's part of the life of the Homestead.

When the season ends, the calendar moves forward, your farm changes, and another ten days begin.

Help Shape Meadowbrook

Your Homestead isn't the only place that will change over five years.

Just beyond your farm is Meadowbrook, a small town with room to grow and you get a say in what it becomes.

There are more town projects than there are spots to hold them so you can't get it all in a single game. As your farm begins producing more than you need, you'll have to decide where that harvest goes and what deserves to be built.

Sell it for Gold and invest back into your Homestead?

Or set some aside as provisions and help Meadowbrook build something new?

The projects you support can open new opportunities and change the relationship between your farm and the town. You'll also visit Meadowbrook during your evenings, follow the local market through the Meadowbrook Gazette, take on Help Wanted jobs, and make use of the places you've helped develop.

By the end of five years, your Meadowbrook may look very different from someone else's.

The town grows alongside your Homestead.

Five Years You Can Keep

My Five Year Almanac isn't designed to disappear when the game ends.

Across 15 changing seasons and 150 active days, you'll leave little pieces of your game behind on its pages.

You'll record what happened, make notes, draw, doodle, track the changing seasons, and watch blank spaces slowly fill with the history of your Homestead.

How much you record is entirely up to you.

Maybe your Almanac is full of drawings and little observations. Maybe it's mostly practical notes written quickly in pencil. Maybe you add color as you go—or wait until the fifth year is over and return to those old pages.

Keep your records however you please. There is no wrong way to keep an Almanac.

When your fifth year finally comes to an end, the goal isn't a high score or a perfect farm.

You'll have something better:

A little record of a place that didn't exist until you made it.

Everything You Need to Begin

My Five Year Almanac is being created as a complete Digital Print & Play game.

Print the pages at home, bring along a pencil, a standard six-sided die, and you're ready to begin building your Homestead.

The complete game includes your Five Year Almanac, the Homestead and Meadowbrook, seasonal Almanac card decks, the Meadowbrook Gazette, Storehouse and record keeping pages, reference sheets, and the other printable components you'll need along the way.

The cards are designed so they can be printed, folded, and slipped into standard poker-card sleeves. Add an ordinary playing card behind them if you'd like a little extra weight and stiffness.

Print everything at once, or simply print the pages you need as your five years unfold.

This is a game meant to be printed, written on, drawn in, folded, shuffled, and used.

Don't be afraid to make it yours.

Drawn by Hand, Made to Feel That Way

Every illustration, bit of lettering, little plant, border, building, map and card in My Five Year Almanac has been drawn by hand digitally in Procreate by me.

I wanted the Almanac to feel personal, more like something created and kept by a person than something assembled from perfectly polished graphics.

That means some lines aren't perfectly straight.

Some letters aren't perfectly identical.

That's the point.

This is a game about leaving your own marks behind, so it felt important that mine were there when I handed it to you.

I've spent countless hours drawing, erasing, rewriting and rearranging these pages in Procreate, then printing, cutting, folding, sleeving and playing with them to turn a little idea into something I can finally hold in my hands.

There are no expectations that your Almanac needs to look a certain way, either. Draw with a pencil. Add color. Scribble notes in the margins. Use simple symbols. Fill whole pages with little details—or don't draw anything at all.

And when you begin filling those blank spaces yourself, my drawings stop being the finished product.

Yours become part of it.

About the Creator

Hi, I'm Shane, the independent designer and artist behind MSM Games.

I've loved tabletop games for most of my life, from wargames and tactical games to board games and quiet solo experiences. Eventually, playing games turned into making them.

MSM Games is my little corner of the tabletop world where I can follow whatever idea catches my imagination. Sometimes that might mean soldiers and dice on a battlefield. Sometimes, apparently, it means spending five imaginary years tending potatoes and drawing a farmhouse. 

My Five Year Almanac was designed, illustrated, and assembled by me. The artwork was drawn digitally by hand in Procreate, and I've handled everything from writing and playtesting to printing, cutting, folding, and sleeving the prototypes you see throughout this campaign.

I'm not trying to build one particular kind of game.

I just want to keep making games I'd be excited to find and play myself, and hopefully find some other people who want to play them too.

Why Kickstarter?

My Five Year Almanac started as a small idea: a farming game that wouldn't end with a final score, but would leave you with something you could keep.

That little idea grew into five years of seasons, cards, crops, maps, buildings, markets, a town called Meadowbrook, and a whole lot of drawing.

Now, the game is complete.

The pages are drawn. The cards have been printed, folded, sleeved, and shuffled. The systems have been played, tested, changed, and played again. And sitting on my table is the game that, not very long ago, existed only as an idea in my head.

Kickstarter is the next step.

I'm not using this campaign to fund the development of a game I hope to make someday. My Five Year Almanac is finished and ready to play.

I'm here to find out if anyone else wants to build a Homestead of their own.

I'm keeping this campaign intentionally small. At its heart is the complete Digital Print & Play game, with only a handful of special physical rewards for those who would like to support the project a little further.

I've made the game I wanted to make.

Now I'd love the chance to see what you make with it.

Your Homestead Is Waiting

At the beginning of My Five Year Almanac, there isn't much there.

A little land.

A pond.

The beginnings of a quarry and woods.

Two small paths leading toward a farmhouse that hasn't even been drawn yet.

And five years ahead of you.

What happens after that belongs to you.

Maybe you'll cover the fields with wheat. Maybe you'll build an orchard. Maybe Meadowbrook will grow in ways you didn't expect. Maybe a carefully planned season will be interrupted by terrible weather—or you'll spend an afternoon doing something simply because it felt like the right thing to do.

There is no perfect Homestead waiting at the end.

There is only yours.

Thank you for taking the time to visit My Five Year Almanac, and especially to everyone who chooses to help me bring it across the finish line.

I hope that someday you can open your finished Almanac, flip back to those first nearly-empty pages, and remember when all you had was a little patch of land and five years ahead of you.

Your Homestead is waiting.