Summary
Dead of Winter is a semi-cooperative zombie survival-themed game of resource scarcity. Players each control a band of survivors and take turns to move their survivors around, fight zombies, scavenge resources, and contribute to dealing with crises that affect the “colony” (the group of player-controlled characters and helpless survivors) as a whole as well as ensuring the colony has enough food to stave of starvation. The ultimate aim is determined by an objective card chosen at the start of the game, but this must be achieved within a fixed number of turns, and without colony morale being reduced to zero; and there are several competing problems to tackle at any given time, all of which threaten to reduce morale.
Gameplay
The focus of the action is moving your survivors around the board to fight zombies and search for resource cards. I’ll elaborate on this a bit below, but suffice to say there’s not much to these individual actions – instead, the cumulative effect of small decisions is what decides whether you win the game. Mostly this is a matter of how much effort the group as a whole puts into pursuing each of the various competing challenges. On which subject…
As mentioned in the introductory paragraph, DoW is about resource scarcity. This is because multiple and competing pressures require you to burn through (a) the limited number of actions you can take on your go and (b) the limited resource cards available to you. These pressures include:
Zombies. If you don’t kill the zombies, they will kill your survivors. If a survivor dies, you lose morale. Plus you’ve still got a ton of zombies that will likely kill other survivors in future.
Food. If you don’t produce enough food (one type of resource card) to feed the colony, it starves. Starvation loses you morale. Plus starvation is like a wound, it sticks around and sucks away morale over time.
Waste. Every time you use a card it goes in the waste pile. If the waste pile gets too big, you lose morale. You can expend actions to reduce the waste pile, but it’s slow going.
Every turn there’s a randomly drawn crisis which you must feed resource cards to avoid negative effects. Negative effects generally means morale loss or the kind of things that can cause morale loss, like more zombies.
When a survivor is wounded, you can use resources to remove those wounds, which you hope will reduce the chance of their dying and… you guessed it, reducing morale. You can get wounded fighting zombies, but also merely moving locations exposes you to the risk of injury or death.
And finally, there’s always the temptation to use your resource cards to boost your actions, leaving you with less to feed the colony and/or fight the current crisis.
All this is made worse by the semi-cooperative nature of the game. The group have a shared objective chosen at the start, but everyone also has a personal (secret) objective drawn at random. Most players need to meet both objectives to win the game, though there may be a BETRAYER who needs only to meet their personal objective. All this means that there is additional pressure on resources from (a) people deliberately using their resource cards inefficiently because it helps their personal objective or (b) worse, people actively working against the group. Beating a crisis potentially means putting in more resource cards than are actually required to combat possible traitors in your midst.
On top of all this there are some random factors which can further hinder you. As mentioned before, fighting zombies and even movement carry a risk of injury. This is mediated through rolling an injury die, which can wound you, give you frostbite (which is a wound that continues to wound you every turn until you die) or 1 time in 12, instantly kills you and potentially others in your location too as the zombie plague rages out of control. Further, on every players’ turn there is a Crossroads card drawn which, based on a secret trigger, may unleash some unknown effect. The effects can be positive – we once had the chance to eat a horse we found lying around, for instance – but some of them are very negative indeed; one player in our game had two characters instantly killed by Crossroads cards. The Crossroads cards always give you a choice between two options, but sometimes one of the options won’t be available and you just have to suck up whatever nastiness the remaining option gives you.
So, you can gather from the above that DoW is a pretty bleak game. There’s a lot of factors going against you, and not much in your favour. I don’t yet have a sense of what that general sense of the world being against you translates to in terms of win/loss ratio. It did not feel as challenging on the first play as, say, Pandemic. But maybe we got lucky.
It’s worth a quick discussion of how this game relates to Battlestar Galactica. The two games have a lot in common, and I would be astonished if the designers hadn’t consciously built DoW on the foundation provided by BSG. In both games you have people who have their own secret objectives that cut across or go against the group’s objective; you have regular crises that require everyone to contribute cards to meet an objective, but during which it’s possible to secretly work against the group; you have the constant external threat (zombies or cylons) and you have the fight to avoid running out of resources. The two games are similar, but there are also major differences. In BSG the main focus is the crisis cards; they happen once every player-turn and throw in a random factor that makes it harder to meet the target number and easier for a traitor to cover their tracks. In DoW the crisis cards are less frequent and there’s no random factor, so you always know if a traitor has worked against you and, assuming there isn’t, you always know if you’ve beat the target. In DoW you have to work to get the resource cards to beat the crisis and feed the colony, so there’s a constant downward pressure on resources, while in BSG your cards regularly refresh so the focus is more on whether you can make it through the turn without running out. DoW is more deadly, but you get more than one character and if all a players’ characters die then they get a free replacement. In BSG it’s harder to detect a traitor and also harder to neutralise them, while in DoW there may not even be a traitor, but everyone has objectives that cut against the group slightly, while an exiled traitor (or an unjustly exiled innocent) is less disadvantaged and maintains a more constant play experience. Bottom line: if you liked one, you may well like the other, but don’t expect them to be that similar.
Overall I was impressed with DoW. I’m a big fan of BSG and I found DoW to be very similar, but refreshingly different. If you like cooperative play with a soupcon of player vs player paranoia, DoW is worth a look.
