Dead of Winter

Alright, let me get my disclaimer out of the way. I hate zombies. I hate movies about zombies, I hate comics about zombies, I hate TV shows about zombies and I HATE HATE HATE games about zombies. I hated zombies when the fad was just beginning to roll and I hate it even more now that it seems all pervasive.

So why then am I starting a thread about it? Well because it deserves some discussion above and beyond the sort of thing you get from real life zombies shambling into the bright light of the "new hotness".

The game is the tired, oh so tired, cliche of a colony of survivors after a biological Zombie Apocalypse. Meaning they are created from bacteria and not black magic. On top of that, it is the coldest winter in living memory and if brain hungry automatons aren't dangerous enough you have got the continuous danger of the elements in a world where the infrastructure we take for granted no longer exists.

So that's the candy coating. What you have underneath is really a somewhat slicked down version of Battlestar Galactica. No, I'm not saying it's "like BSG". I am saying it is BSG with a few modifications. But those modifications are important. Read on, F:ATie, and I shall 'splain.

The game is co-op with the potential of a traitor. The good guys seek to have the colony survive. The bad guy, if there is one, wants it to wither for whatever reason.

The play area is separated into The Colony which is home base and six external locations such as The School, The Police Station, The Hospital, etc. There are resources in the form of cards of several different flavors such as medicine, food, fuel, etc.

Every turn The Colony will face some form of crisis that will require the players to contribute resources to avert some nastiness. Cards played against the threat of the right flavor help and those of the wrong flavor hurt. They are played face down so if there is a traitor you won't necessarily know who it is.

Then players take their actions. Doing things like gathering resources so that the crisis can be met or working toward the greater goal laid out on the scenario card which will result in the survival of the colony. Or they might go killing zombies so that the colony isn't over run.

At the end of the turn the colony must be fed, the crisis must be averted and new zombies must be placed which hopefully aren't so numerous that they "overrun" a location and kill someone. Failure results in the loss of morale and when that reaches 0 the players lose.

So far, all this is straight from BSG. But as I said there are some modifications.

1) You aren't just controlling one dude. You have a posse. Each individual survivor having some neat little ability that you can use to aid or hinder the colony. Some are cool, some are more valuable than others and some are silly. The Mall Santa's special ability is that if you feed him to the zombies, the morale of the entire colony goes up...cuz nobody likes a drunk skinny Santa.

2) The game has removed some of the extraneous crap that, at least to me, bogged down BSG and made it something of a drag. There aren't three tracks as in BSG, there is only morale. You aren't setting up three or four different types of enemies there are only zombies. Combat is extremely simple and fast. The end result is that the game plays MUCH faster than BSG ever did or will. And this is a good thing because I think BSG runs way too long.

3) There are action dice. Every turn you roll a number of dice equal to the number of individual survivors you control plus one. (You've got 2 dudes you roll 3 dice). These then can be used to allow your survivors to fight or search for stuff provided the die result is over a specified target number which varies from survivor to survivor. The soldier can fight with a lower die result, the librarian likewise can search with a lower die. Other actions can be done with any die result but each action, with a few exceptions, must me paid for with a die of some kind. This is a pretty neat mechanic and prevents the game from being too deterministic. Rolling dice is fun and exciting.

4) The game is brutally deadly. Every time you move from the colony to an outside location and every time you fight a zombie you must make a roll on the "exposure die" which is a 12 sider with half blank and half wound results. 3 wounds and your dead, a "frost bite" wound and you get an additional wound on that dude at the start of ever turn until it's healed, roll the dreaded "tooth" and your dude has been infected and is auto-dead with a chance of the plague spreading to other survivors in his area. Sucky when your alone but get bit at the colony and it could be catastrophic. Also the morale of the colony goes down every time a survivor dies so it only takes a couple of deaths to spike your chances of victory.

4) Each person gets a "secret" objective card with conditions for victory. See, it's not enough that the colony must survive, you need to meet this condition to actually win. Have more cards than anyone else, have there be no zombies at the colony location, stuff like that. Most also require the colony survive but not all. So you can have some players each loyal but working at cross purposes. I want there to be a certain amount of food at the colony but you want there to be a certain number of survivors but each survivor eats more food. So an interesting dynamic is in play.

5) Lastly there is the much ballyhooed "Crossroad" cards. These are random events that may or may not take place on your turn depending on if your actions coincide with a "trigger" on the card. The card is controlled by the player to your right. It's an attempt to keep players engaged with the game when it's not their turn and to provide some random events such as new survivors and other neat things. I like what they do and think they add to the experience.

So is it any good? Yeah, I think it is. The faster play and semi-streamlined design make it superior to BSG. The crossroads cards are fun to read and use even if the text is microscopic. The graphic design of the game is good. All the cards are standard poker size not FFG's mini cards. They are, with the exception of the crossroads cards, easy to read and use. The game comes with standees for the survivors and zombies. Yah, people clamor for minis but I like standees when they are done well, these are, and they keep costs lower than otherwise.

I've played it four times now and won two and lost two. The scenario cards are double sided with a normal side and a hard side. So if the game is too easy you can play with the increased difficulty.

The game is or soon will be sold out and the aftermarket prices are already doing their skyrocketing...at least until it's forgotten by the New Hotness crowd. Plaid Hat is taking pre-orders for the second printing. It's definitely worth the normal price of $40 (pre-order) that I paid. No way is it worth $100+ that I've been seeing. Wait for it to be easily available to buy it if think it's for you.

I almost guarantee that there will be expansions in the form of additional cards and survivors but this game feels complete out of the box. Not a whole game split in half to get you to buy in. In the future they plan to release other games of the same system with different themes. I forget which ones they were considering but at least a couple of them looked cool. At least cooler than zombies.

Look this is simple:

Can you scream at another player 'You lying bastard you're a friggin' Cylon and I knew it from the beginning'? NO

Can you pretend to be Starbuck pew pewing all the Cylons as you mercilessly blast them from the sky? NO

Can you fire a fucking NUKE at them when they piss you off? NO

Ergo, if you continue to diss BSG I will have to get into my Donald Sutherland pose and start pointing at you while emitting an ear splitting scream.

I heard the traitor mechanic is a bit shit because the traitor just has to do nothing and the colony will, in all likelihood, fail anyway with no input from the traitor. Sounds like a bit more play testing on the efficacy of the traitor mechanic might have been in order.

That's all true. I haven't played it with a large group yet only 3. Traitor mechanics usually flourish at maximum player counts. Thematically, traitor doesn't work all that well. A Cylon agent makes sence but someone working for zombies?

What is cool is that a person can be exiled from the colony by a vote of the players. The exiled person is no longer allowed inside the colony and must move from external location to external location. The normal secret objective is swapped for an exile objective which may or may not be fueled by a vengeful desire to see the colony fail.

Interested in this one. Has anyone played this exhaustively? Wonder if I should get BSG, this (for reduced playtime and a zombie game not mainly about killing zombies) or just go straight for Resistance.

repoman wrote: Thematically, traitor doesn't work all that well. A Cylon agent makes sense but someone working for zombies?

Not in a "real life" zombie scenario, if you know what I mean, but totally captures zombie movies/comics/shows. There are always traitors in the midst... people whose self-interests end up undoing the survivors.

Resistance is its own beast. I personally think DoW blows BSG away.

The traitor isn't working for the zombies. He's a mole planted from another colony, with designs on taking THIS colony down from the inside. Barring that, he's just an evil person thriving in the new world.

I've only played Dead of Winter one time and I enjoyed it. The atmosphere is great and the way the board is set up it feels oppressive with the zombies sort of surrounding you. I still have concerns that it may be too easy to win as the betrayer and I also don't think this is a replacement for BSG in any way, but I'd like to play it again.

I'm probably going to stick it out and wait for Plaid Hat to release games with the same engine with a different theme. That both a) avoids boring zombie shit and b) gives them a chance to do a "revised' version of the system that will probably be better.

Thanks for the write up, though!

Yah I wish I could remember where I saw what they were thinking about. Maybe their website in news or maybe on BGG. I remember thinking "Ugh" on a couple of 'em and "Hmmm" on a couple of 'em.

I wanted to add that in regard to being exiled...I think this is a great idea. It avoids those situations in BSG where people "think" you are a traitor and keep sending you to the brig. Thing is, you aren't a traitor and so you are effectively removed from the game with no recourse really.

Here if you are accused but aren't the bad guy. You are still in the game and can still win.

***some time later***

Doing some looking around. There was a vote and I think I saw it in the Plaid Hat newsletter. Anyway some if not all possible future settings:

Deep Underground: Not sure if that's fantasy/journey to the center of the earth/or spelunking horror

Space: "Alien" type thing or "Lost in Space" I hope it's more a Lost or marooned in space thing because Alien-like settings are a dime a dozen.

Summer Camp: More 80's Horror Summer Camp where sex = death than Meatballs "It Just Doesn't Matter" Summer Camp.

Feudal Japan: No idea how that would work but this one sounds super cool..which means because voters will be mostly BGGers..it won't be the one picked.

I've played this about a half dozen times, it's a fun game but it's not better than BSG. For as much play testing as I'd heard this game got, it's balance is a little disappointing. The betrayer has it pretty easy just not helping 100%, the game itself is tough, and the way it scales with crisis based on players it's not hard to hinder and stay hidden. I've never seen a played exiled. There are good things here, but overall they'd work a lot better in a tighter design.

We have about 5 plays of Dead of Winter in now, and I'm really enjoying it. I don't really get excited about zombie anything, but in this game the zombies work.

I don't think it displaces BSG in any way though, for all the reasons that Thirsty pointed out. Dead of Winter is more of a survival game that has a traitor mechanic than the other way around. BSG plays out more like an espionage movie where the traitor concept is front & center.

Bull Nakano wrote: I've played this about a half dozen times, it's a fun game but it's not better than BSG. The betrayer has it pretty easy just not helping 100%, the game itself is tough, and the way it scales with crisis based on players it's not hard to hinder and stay hidden. I've never seen a played exiled.

I've only played once, and I went in not knowing that it was a BSG offshoot. I'm not a big BSG fan, but the crisis mechanic was easy to spot.

We did exile a player, and that player was a traitor who would have won otherwise. As it ended up, nobody won because we couldn't complete the main objective and all "good guy" objectives depended on that. (Possibly they all do. I dunno.)

The explainer got some rules wrong, but I'm not sure our experience was completely blown. It mostly worked.

A few notes:

I never experienced zombie overload before, but it kicked in big-time with DoW. I never need to play another zombie game again. Also, my favorite zombie-fest is still Mall of Horror.

Having all players pre-roll their dice speeds up the game and allows for careful planning, but it also drains some of the tension from the game.

My biggest complaint, strangely, is that the flavor text doesn't appear frequently enough, but when it does it's way too long. When called upon, the player to your right launches into a soliloquy that seemingly never ends. The reader is exhausted by the time the main text is complete, and then s/he also has to read aloud the "option" section so that the affected player can make a decision. I think it would be more fun, Arkham Horror style, if the player didn't know the outcome of his/her decision before making it. (At least, that's how we've always played AH.)

DoW seems to be shorter than BSG. For me, that's always a good thing. I have too many memories of BSG dragging on and on.

Anyway, despite my zombie OD, I thought it was fine, and I'm going to try again to see if playing 100% correctly makes it better. We have another game scheduled for Wednesday.

Bull Nakano wrote: I've played this about a half dozen times, it's a fun game but it's not better than BSG. For as much play testing as I'd heard this game got, it's balance is a little disappointing. The betrayer has it pretty easy just not helping 100%, the game itself is tough, and the way it scales with crisis based on players it's not hard to hinder and stay hidden. I've never seen a played exiled. There are good things here, but overall they'd work a lot better in a tighter design.

Bull, when you say it's not better than BSG, does that mean BSG is better than DoW?

Yes. Keeping in mind they're slightly different in that the traitor mechanism of DoW is more similar to Shadows of Camelot, I find BSG to be a better game. The guarantee of two Cylons in BSG makes it different in you're actively hunting for them and BSG offers lulls to let players breathe (when you lose the Cylon ships). In DoW it's just a constant grind, but nearly every turn's needs are the same. You will need N of a resource, N/2 food, and have to kill N zombies so they don't gain ground while attempting the main objective. I'm not trying to make it sound formulaic, because it works fine, but that's every turn, and it's usually not easy.

I've read the rules for all these games. I like how BSG has ups and downs instead of constant tests of endurance.

About the traitor, do you guys feel that there's lack of gameplay components to sufficiently deduct who's the traitor and exile him?

Decision, decision...