Dead of Winter Review

Designer: Jonathan Gilmour & Isaac Vega

Artist: Dave Richards, Fernanda Suarez & Peter Wocken

Publisher: Plaid Hat Games

Number of Players: 2-5

Duration: 100 mins

Overview

Dead of Winter was one of the hottest games released in 2014 and is the first of the Crossroads series of games from Plaid Hat Games.

In this game, you and the other players each control a group of survivors that have banded together in a colony, trying to make it through a harsh winter during a zombie apocalypse. Everyone is working for the common good… or are they? There is a chance there is a betrayer in your midst hoping that your attempts to keep everyone fed and happy will fail and perhaps even actively sabotaging your efforts. *cue dramatic music*

Gameplay

If I were to try to explain all the rules to you here… you’d be reading for quite a while and probably wouldn’t learn much. This game is a bit intimidating to teach because of the amount of components and different things that occur during the game. If you do want some help with how to play, Rodney Smith of “Watch it Played” has a great video on YouTube that you can check out. I’ll post a link to that video at the bottom of this review.

The set-up of this game is a little annoying, as are the storage of the tons and tons of standees and other components. This is understandable with a game that has so much going on, but still frustrating when all you want to do is get the game out and start playing. A common solve amongst gamers seems to be making custom inserts for the box to help with storage, organization and set-up. I haven’t tried making my own yet, so for me, everything gets thrown into the box together in the provided plastic bags.

There are a variety of different scenarios that can be played, so each time you play the game, you’ll be working toward a different group objective. The group objectives each have a normal and hardcore mode and show whether their playtime is short, medium or long. Each player is also dealt an individual objective and there is a chance that one of the players will receive a betrayal card and their objective will go against the good of the group.

Players move their survivors around the board, look for items, fight zombies, build barricades, and resolve a new crisis during every round—always trying to keep the group from starving and the morale from dropping to zero. If you accomplish your individual objective and the group’s objective, you win! This means there isn’t always a winning team. One player might win, a couple could win, or everyone could win during a game where there is no betrayer and everyone met their objectives.

Dealing with a possible betrayer is interesting because if you think there is a betrayer amongst you, you can call a vote to exile that player, making their gameplay options more limited. But if you exile two players and neither is the traitor, the good guys lose immediately. Exiling is a high-risk option that should be taken seriously because if you exile a good guy, your chances of winning decrease since they aren’t able to help the group as much after they are exiled.

Two of my favorite parts of this game are the exposure die and the crossroads cards.

When your survivors travel between locations in the game or fight zombies, you have to roll the 12-sided exposure die. I’ve encountered a lot of stressful dice rolling situations in the past, but this single red die made my heart rate climb every time I picked it up. The sides of the die are either blank (good) or contain one of three symbols, a wound (bad), frostbite (really bad), or a bite (instant death). That bite symbol is only on one side of out of 12, but the fear of rolling it and having one of your survivors die immediately with the possibility of other nearby survivors dying too was enough to make me sweat every time I had to touch that blood-colored die. My friends quickly discovered how absolutely terrifying that die could be as the bite symbol seemed to rear its toothy head more often than we would have guessed during our most recent game.

The crossroads cards are a brilliant mechanic. I haven’t run into anything quite like these in another game before. On each player’s turn, the player to their right draws the top card of the crossroads deck and if the requirements listed on the card are met during that turn, play is stopped and the scenario on the card is read and resolved. If the requirements aren’t met, the card goes to the bottom of the crossroads deck, unread. Some crossroads cards are helpful and some are downright brutal. Each adds to the story that is playing out during the game making the experience even more immersive and interesting. During our recent game, a crossroads card that was read described how one of the survivors discovered a guitar as they were rummaging around for supplies, tuned it up, and serenaded the rest of the group giving us all a bonus die on our next turn. It was a surprisingly lovely moment in an otherwise grim and stressful game!

Final Thoughts

Full disclosure: I usually don’t like anything related to zombies. I’ve just never had an affinity for the walking dead. I’ve generally avoided other games with a zombie theme in the past but I am so glad I decided to give this one a try. Dead of Winter is truly a spectacular game. While it seems like a plain ol’ zombie game at first glance, the zombies are the background noise in an experience that is genuinely focused on the survivors and their story, which is why I love it so much. If you have avoided playing or buying this game simply because of the zombie motif, I can categorically state that you’re missing out.

This game struck me as somewhat similar to the Battlestar Galactica Board Game because of the way a potential betrayer is introduced into the group and how each crisis is resolved (every player contributes cards to help prevent a crisis from occurring). My familiarity with BSG made this game a little easier to learn but it didn’t prevent me from having a unique and wonderful new gaming experience. In BSG, if you’re secretly a bad guy and you aren’t really good at managing your play, it can be fairly easy to be found out. In DoW, since every player has their own objective, sometimes even a good player can look suspicious because they might choose actions that don’t appear to help the group in the hopes of achieving their personal objective. One of the good guys in my most recent playthrough could only complete his secret objective if at least three survivors in the game died. He was stressing because he knew he might have to cause other survivors to die but didn’t want to throw suspicion onto himself. I think the personal objectives help make it easier for the betrayer to stay hidden and cranks the paranoia level up to 11 because you never know whom you can trust.

As I stated at the beginning of this review, this is the first game in a series of crossroads games. There will be more! That fact makes me almost more excited than the game itself. Plaid Hat has created a co-op game that is brilliantly stressful and yet so much fun to play. Future games in this series will definitely have a home in my collection and I was excited to learn that the rumored theme of the next game will be space-related.

I’m just some random person on the internet, but all I know is if you like board games you should definitely play Dead of Winter. I haven’t talked to anyone who dislikes this game and it is one of my new favorites.

Want help learning how to play? Watch the video below.