Dead of Winter

A Euro-loving friend of mine recently tried Dead of Winter and enjoyed it. However, he was the traitor, but found it nearly impossible to pursue his own victory condition, so he just supported the other players and then they all lost anyway. Apparently he was supposed to be a glutton. By coincidence, they sent him to gather food, but he got really unlucky and didn't find much. So they accused him of being a traitor even though he was refraining from treacherous behavior because of his bad luck.

Jexik wrote: 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.

Good observation. Game length is too often criticized. But sometimes the burden of investing time in a game is exactly what is needed to push it past its mechanics and into the territory of real psychodrama.

I dunno...I still haven't played it and with all the buzz I think I want to, especially with how Jerry described it. That review was far from negative, it was really more "apathetic" than negative.

Someday when I'm done paying off my HELOC that funded all the additions to the house, I'll buy it. Until then, I'm playing El Grande or Bioshock (Not the board game) or Battlefield 3.

The one time I played it, the scenario started at six morale, we lost two from people dying to bite rolls, and then on the turn we would have "won" at the end of (only two of us would have actually won) the betrayer managed to tank away the remaining four. I'm not sure what we could have done to stop him, and I'm not sure I care. Those were the only two ways we lost morale.

I'd play it again if someone asked, but having a player have the ability to tank the game that much on a single turn without doing anything before that... ugh.

It's really tough to balance a game that only sometimes includes a traitor. I'm not sure that some of these games (Dead of Winter, Shadows Over Camelot) are getting playtested enough to work out the game balance.

I've gotten some more playtime of both Dead of Winter and BSG in recently. As much as I like the storyline bits of Dead of Winter, BSG is the better game.

This isn't to disparage Dead of Winter in any way, but repeated plays have helped me put my finger on what makes the difference between the two and why I find it compelling.

• Dead of Winter has a lot of flavor text, particularly on the Crossroads Cards. This produces in-game story-like moments that I really enjoy. Sometimes at the end of the game we come back to the decisions and story moments of Crossroads Cards as turning points in the game or, "I can't believe you did that!" type conversations. Since there will be a traitor in BSG, these types of events tend to occur anyway without the game-pausing story events.
• Every choice in BSG matters, because suspicion is always a factor. That jump seems weak, can you trust the Admiral? Why does the President never use their Quorum Cards? Was it really smart for Starbuck to try gather Repair Cards instead of getting her ass out in a Viper? Not every choice in Dead of Winter carries a lot of weight. Many of the choices appear to carry a lot of weight, but the Roll the Exposure Die and... DIE! part can sometimes cut your choices short before they ever get a chance to make any difference.
• I like Dead of Winter's Exposure Die due to the risk it represents, but it seems to throw the cooperative discussion astray. It can shift the ever-enjoyable, "How do we pull this off?" discussion into a D12 odds and risk mitigation discussion. The same types of discussions in BSG revolve more around who may or may not be a Cylon rather than the Exposure Die, and that's simply more interesting.
• The Upkeep Phase. Dead of Winter's Upkeep Phase is an old-style game-pausing, "Well the round is over," immersion-breaking event. You get to reveal the Crisis contributions, which is fun, but then you get to do all the Upkeep stuff. You place zombies, break barricades, maybe some Survivors die, and then you get to pass the first player marker and start another round. I realized in our last big BSG game what a stroke of genius the complete lack of an Upkeep Phase is in BSG. Turns just go around and around, suspicions build, discussions get heated, Crises are always happening, and there is never a big Pause The Game moment.
• Personal Goals are another thing I really like about Dead of Winter, but with the expansions I can play with or without a very similar mechanic in BSG.

The above isn't intended to sound negative. I enjoy Dead of Winter quite a bit for all the same reasons I've already posted in F:AT. Now having spent even more time with it; however, I simply find BSG more interesting.

Which BSG do you speak of? The base game by itself, or with the fixins included?

Sagrilarus wrote: Which BSG do you speak of? The base game by itself, or with the fixins included?

I prefer all the fixins. We typically play with all the expansions, so my post probably should have stated that. But most of the above applies to the BSG base game as well. My only major complaint about the BSG base game is that the Cylon Attack Crisis Cards can sometimes be distributed poorly such that the game is a cakewalk or impossible, and compared to that Dead of Winter does have better pacing without expansions.