Board Games: Dead of Winter

Vacation is a great time time to play board games and we played a new one called Dead of Winter by Plaid Hat Games.  Do you like Walking Dead as in the TV series or comic book?  This is about as close to that setting  as you can get without actually turning into a zombie.

I really enjoyed this game.  Setup takes a bit of time and the game itself can last awhile depending on the number of players and the scenario you play.  The game comes with multiple scenarios, each of which describes the overall story objective you as a group of survivors are trying to achieve.  Some scenarios are longer than others, but each one can change the way the game is played each time resulting in some great replayability.  We played a "short" scenario with 5 players (which is the max players for the game) and it took us about 2 hours to finish a play through. We were going a little slower than normal because we were all still trying to learn the game.

The game is a cooperative game with a twist.  All the players a the table are working together in a world where zombies have overtaken the world to solve the chosen scenario.  The one we chose was "We need more samples."  The premise is that the doctor in our camp needed samples from a zombies to try and find a cure.  So over the course of the game we all needed to kill zombies and each killed zombie gave us a potential chance of retrieving a sample.  Each player starts the game controlling 2 survivors, but you can gain new followers or you can also lose survivors if they get bitten by zombies.

The main objective is just one of the things you are trying to accomplish.  The reason the game is a coop game with a twist is because besides the overall game objective that everyone is trying to work together to accomplish each play has a secret objective as well.   Only you know your secret objective in the form of a card at the beginning of the game.  For most of these are you need to complete the main objective and do a second task.  The second task could be you need to have a certain number of cards in you hand at the end of the game.  To win the game you must complete all the objectives on your card.  So some players could win, all could win, or none could win when the game ends.  In every game, there is a chance one player could get a secret objective that is a "Betrayer."  In this case your objective is to work against the other players and meet your secret objective while not letting them find you out.  In our game, luck was with us and none of us drew a betrayer card as a secret objective.  However I can see where this twist could really make it much more difficult in some of the situations that come up in the game.

So you have game objective outlined in the scenario chosen at the game start and a secret player objective to achieve as you go through the game.  The last thing going on is that in each round the colony is also experiencing a "Crisis"  The crisis card is on the table and each player has a chance to help in contributing to overcoming the crisis before the card is resolved.  The crisis cards are all based on the colony being short of some supply like fuel, food, or medicine.  The players place the supply cards from their hands on the board face down if they want to contribute to a crisis.  After every player has taken a turn the supply cards are shuffled and if the correct number of cards, say medicine are in the stack the crisis is resolved for that round.  The cards are placed face down and shuffled because a betrayer could have contributed the wrong supply card to the mix which means it cancels out one right supply card for every wrong card turned over.  This is where a betrayer can really screw the rest of the players.  If the crisis is not resolved something bad happens like more zombies show up or you lose morale.  Once morale of the colony hits 0, the games is over and everyone loses, except possibly the betrayer if there is one. The good news is that if you can figure out who the betrayer is, the colony can chose to vote him out of the colony Survivor style.  They keep playing the game, but they are not part of the colony and cannot contribute to helping resolve the crisis each round.  They will have there own set of problems to worry about.

So all this sounds complicated, but once you get the hang of it, it flows smoothly.  The crisis and even the main story resolves around two things, killing zombies so they down't overrun your colony and going to locations and searching for more item cards which you need to resolve the crisis each round, meet secret objectives, feed the colony, or fix a wounded teammate.  The game board has 5 locations you can move to and search for those item cards.  You can also attack a zombie at the locations.  These actions are done with dice.  I won't go into all the specifics but each player has a pool of dice that are used to perform actions like attacking.  And the other important thing in the game is that anytime you move to a new location or attack a zombie you need to roll the red exposure die.  Either nothing happens, your survivor gets wounded (3 wounds and they die), or they are infected and auto die.  If they are infected they can spread the infection to other survivors if any share your location.  Anytime a survivor dies the group loses a morale.  So you don't want to lose too many.  On the flip-side there are some cards you can find at the locations that will give you new survivors to control.

The game board and locations are shown in the picture below to gives a little more idea on how the game looks when set up.

The last thing I will talk about is one other thing the game throws at you as if you don't already have enough to think about.  The game tries to immerse you in the world of survival.  As each player takes a turn, the player on their right draws a Crossroad card.  This card has a trigger that only the player on the right reads.  If the player taking a turn triggers the card, then the card is read out loud and the player taking a turn will have to make a decision.   A card trigger may be the player taking a turn moves their survivor to a new location.  If they do move a survivor to a new location then they trigger the crossroads card.  The card may describe a blizzard where they player can either not move at all or roll the exposure die 2 extra times instead of just once because they can't see as well in the blizzard. 

There are a lot of other small details I didn't go into, but the game is really fun and does a great job of setting up a serious and believable setting.  Give this one a try.  The only negatives I heard during out playthouggh is that with 5 people there is some downtime between turns.  There is so much each person can do that it can take a bit of time for a player to finish their turn.  It is a coop game though so there is plenty of discussion and talk among players to help make the best decisions that helps with downtime and the crossroads card help keep one other player more involved as well.  The other negative was length.  We started late and did not finish until 1 AM, so with 5 people the game can last awhile even with a "short" scenario.    In the end we managed to get all the "samples," but only 3 out of five of us also completed our secret objective.   Overall I still highly recommend this game!