Dead of Winter

Last Saturday I finally got to play a cool board game called Dead of Winter.

These days you can't take three steps without tripping over something with zombies in it, but DoW is slightly different.

Yes, there are zombies and they can be lethal, but the real challenge is managing resources and dealing with other survivors.

At the start of the game, every player draws a secret objective card, and amongst those is a traitor card. But there are enough regular secrets that you don't know if there even is a traitor in any given game. It's just that there might be a traitor that adds tension.

In order to win, the main objective of the scenario has to be fulfilled as well as your own secret objective, and this can be very hard as the other players won't necessarily cooperate with you.

There are lots of other difficulties as well. Random events can appear and derail everything badly, and the crisis deck that adds pressure every turn can change a fairly placid scenario into a panicked frenzy.

Since I've only played two games, I'm not qualified to actually review Dead of Winter properly, but from what I can tell, it's a great game that could benefit from a little more love.

Take the crisis deck as an example. From what I've seen, every crisis is collect as many of a particular resource as there are players or bad stuff happens. There doesn't seem to be any variation on that which is a shame.

But over all, I'm impressed. The artwork is sharp and detailed, the flavor texts are really good. And the mechanics that govern the game as a whole are very sharp.

So if you're looking to fortify a base and explore a small town in the middle of a harsh winter, with one of your fiends a potential traitor, get Dead of Winter.

Until next time, have a great week!