Dead of Winter

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...

Sevej wrote: 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...

I think BSG requires more experience to be an effective non-obvious traitor. Dead of Winter requires more experience to play well and win, whether there's a traitor or not. Both games get better with experience, but the traitor is more front-and-center in BSG.

Is there any sort of pacing control in DoW?

Pandemic is great because the game control the pacing with Epidemics, creating tense and lull moments. In contrast Forbidden Desert dangers are just constantly coming in.

I'm in a weird spot here. On the one hand, I've played it about 15 or more times and like it quite a bit. On the other hand, I worked for Colby for a couple years on Summoner Wars, doing a little bit of design and he eventually named a card after me. I've slept in the same hotel room as Isaac and a bunch of the other plaid hat guys, had dinner, etc. I've demo'd Summoner Wars, Video Game High School, Bioshock, and even Dead of Winter for them at cons. That said, I was not as excited about any other game they made since Summoner Wars as this one. (And I had nothing to do with making it). When Isaac asked for honest feedback on another game he designed, I replied, "it works." When I played DoW Saturday night at Origins, I was convinced it would be their next biggest seller. I'm also a terrible liar unless I'm playing The Resistance.

If nothing else, the game looks great. The illustrations are pretty and evocative of the setting. The graphic design is rock solid; the player aid is good and the tokens all make it intuitive. I was skeptical of the standees, but like how they look in person. They're thicker cardboard than I expected. Since I'm not a painter, I much prefer this presentation to minis. I've seen photos of people using Zombicide minis in place of the zombie standees, and it looked off to me.

The more I play it, the more I think that with "correct" play the game is 90% winnable for the colony in the absence of a betrayer. I don't mean that everyone will win their secret objective, but most at the table should. The first few games can be rough, but each scenario teaches you a valuable skill that can be used to make other objectives (and your secret ones) easier to achieve. Even though it's winnable, you're often put in spots where you're unsure how much you should give to the common good, so the tension is still there. But if I treat this as Castles of Burgundy with some unnecessary fluff, I'm missing the point. (I don't care for Castles of Burgundy, but it has the dice allocation thing going on).

So what about the betrayer? They show up roughly 45% of the time, but you can adjust that chance if you like. Many of their objectives are very difficult. Theoretically, they need to be more selfish throughout the game and that will tip people off. In practice I've found it difficult to sniff them out. We've exiled a betrayer once so far, and everyone lost that game, including him. But just having one guy who's not totally out for the good of the colony makes it very hard to win- I've only won once against a betrayer, out of 7 games that have had them. Of those, I've only seen the betrayer win three times. A lot of games with a betrayer end up with everyone losing. Because of the threat of exile, it's not a good idea for the bad guy to do anything overtly bad until the very end of the game, so it rarely has any kind of "us v. them" feel that you find in BSG or those social games. Zombies are a slowly advancing backdrop. The betrayer usually looks just as helpful as everyone else.

I do worry about how hard it is to win in a betrayer game, but maybe over time people will get better at spotting them or being so efficient that they can't get taken down. Like a lot of games, I think it's probably best in a group of talkative people who are all trash talking and/or getting into their characters rather than focusing on the win and getting grumpy otherwise. I've read about people house-ruling that you have to say how your first two survivors met, for example.

As for the Crossroads, I like them and people have pointed out that they liked them unsolicited. Some cards are much more likely to be triggered than others, so an experienced player will have to hear the same lines more than once after awhile, and there are a bunch that I still haven't seen. Most characters seem to have a card that only triggers if the current player controls that character- those don't come up very often but it's cool when they do. I haven't looked through the deck; I don't want to spoil them. I've never been able to read the same book twice, so I do worry that I'll get sick of hearing some of these Crossroads too many times. "Oh I know this one. No, the wine is not worth it."

The game has a lot of atmosphere between the crossroads cards, items, and characters. There's a lot of searching card decks for needed supplies, and you can make noise to try to to dig for specific cards, knowing that it could attract additional zombies. Using a shotgun or certain crossroads cards can also add noise markers to locations. I doubt I'm the only one that makes a sound effect when people use the shotgun. Players also can make barricades (which is often preferable to fighting zombies directly) and someone has to clean up the waste left by the items players use.

BSG is longer enough that it's a different experience. There's more focus on loyalty in BSG, and I think it feels worse to get backstabbed after four hours than two, so that alone makes it different. One of the guys in my group's number one game is BSG. He said he thinks he likes BSG a little more, but DoW is one of his favorite games. It'll also probably get played more simply due to its shorter playtime. We've played DoW all but one week since GenCon. A couple times we had 2 games running out of the 4-5 tables at the game group.

For the people wondering what the next game is in the series, the Lost in Space (not like the show) setting won the vote from pre-orders of DoW. Isaac is working on it now and that's slated to be next. Jon is also working on the Deep Underground one. They're also working on an expansion to DoW. As repoman said, I don't think it's a game that screams for an expansion, but I'm interested to see what they do with it. Expanding Dead of Winter makes more sense to me than making a Pandemic-lite dice game. I can see the business sense behind both though...

Edit: Someone beat Legomancer to writing a bad review on BGG .

I really don't understand the downtime complaints compared to any other 5-player game. It probably helps that I'm usually teaching the game or finding some other way to talk people into or out of different actions.

I think the most important question is: does the game avoid the usual problem of semi-co-ops? You know, when everybody has their own objectives in addition to the common goal, and when someone realizes that he cannot win, he starts to try to ruin the game for everybody else?

wice wrote: I think the most important question is: does the game avoid the usual problem of semi-co-ops? You know, when everybody has their own objectives in addition to the common goal, and when someone realizes that he cannot win, he starts to try to ruin the game for everybody else?

That's a tough question though because it's not a normal semi-coop where you have to cooperate to some degree but there's only one winner at the end. In this, you truly share victory with the other survivors (not betrayer) so it's murky.

If you and another player are trying to win together, but you also have personal goals you need to accomplish to win, and you cannot complete yours - what incentive is there to tank the game for him? You are on the same side.