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Dead of Winter review: Zombies, frostbite, and betrayal

Ars Cardboard looks at the popular kinda-cooperative zombie board game.

Don Mappin | 17
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Game details

Designers: Jonathan Gilmour and Isaac Vega
Publisher: Plaid Hat Games
Players: 2-5 (best at 3+)
Age: 14+
Playing time: 45 to 90 minutes
Price: $59.99 / £49.99 MSRP - $42.65 / £42 on Amazon

When the zombie apocalypse inevitably comes, I sure hope I’m not stuck in the small town that’s the setting for Dead of Winter. Because boy, are those people just plain screwed. Traversing the hostile wasteland in the vain hope of scavenging supplies, fending off the never-ending onslaught of the undead—the end of the world is rough enough without a bunch of backstabbing friends making things harder.

Billed as a “meta-cooperative psychological survival game,” Dead of Winter sees your intrepid group of two to five friends taking on the role of survivors in a makeshift colony after the dead have risen to roam the earth in search of brains. Things start simply enough: Players decide on a scenario, which lays out the main objective the group needs to complete to win. There are ten total scenarios, each with a "hard" variant. Every player selects two starting characters that form their “faction” within the larger group—everyone is part of the same colony, but that doesn’t mean they trust each other. From there, the game weaves between a fairly by-the-numbers cooperative resource management game and a cutthroat game of guess-the-traitor.

Each player controls two characters at the start of the game. Yes, you can be a dog.
A main objective scenario card flanked by secret objectives. There's a chance you could draw one of the secret Betrayer cards.

Each survivor has a special ability, as well as different stats for his or her influence, attack, and search skills. Some survivors wield considerably more influence and the ability to produce game-altering effects, while others are more efficient at killing and searching for stuff. And you will do a lot of killing and searching for stuff. Don’t get too attached to your survivors, as your faction will likely chew through members like zombies munching for marrow.

In addition to the main objective that the colonists need to fulfill to win the game—collecting samples of zombie DNA or stockpiling food, for example—each player also receives a secret objective. You only win if you’re able to complete both the public and private objectives, so everyone wins or loses separately depending on how well they work with their fellow survivors. It’s this interdependency of multiple objectives conflicting with each other that gives the game its grist.

The scenario also sets the colony’s starting morale and tells you how many rounds you have to complete your objectives. If the colony’s morale reaches zero—or the allotted number of rounds has passed—the game ends and the colonists lose.

In each round, a colony-wide crisis takes place, providing a short-term goal that needs to be achieved to offset a hefty penalty. If you fail, you’ll lose morale (or worse); if you go above and beyond, the colony will receive a bonus. To solve these crises, players donate resource cards to a central pile. At the end of the round, you’ll check to see if the group provided enough of the required resource. Other pressures also loom—you have to feed your survivors and manage resources like waste (yes, someone has to take out the trash!) or colony morale will suffer further.

Every time you move around the board, you have to roll the exposure die. Six sides are blank, five sides will either wound you or give you frostbite, and one side just straight-up kills you. Don't get bitten.
Every time you move around the board, you have to roll the exposure die. Six sides are blank, five sides will either wound you or give you frostbite, and one side just straight-up kills you. Don't get bitten.
Your characters can visit several locations surrounding the colony, such as a school, a police station, and a grocery store. Traveling to these locations is a harrowing affair, requiring the roll of a 12-sided die that determines if a survivor gets frostbitten (it’s really cold) or potentially infected by a zombie. The former will wound your survivors; the latter will kill them instantly—and potentially cause the infection to spread to other survivors at their location. But you have to visit the locations to search for the always-needed supplies, such as food, weapons, and medicine. These areas can also accommodate only a handful of survivors (and zombies), meaning at some point the game will force players into conflict over resource decisions.

In the early rounds, the zombies generally don’t present much of a challenge to the colony. The burden of mouths to feed, the threat of your current crisis, and the need to constantly search for supplies takes precedence. If you’re not careful, though, the undead can sneak up on you. After a few rounds, you may find that there's a startling number of zombies to deal with, and since everyone has been so busy searching (and not killing zombies) you’re in danger of being overrun.

But zombies aren’t the only villains in the game—your fellow players are even more dangerous.

Like Battlestar Galactica… with zombies!

When creating the secret objective deck at the beginning of the game, a special "Betrayal" card is shuffled into the deck. Since you shuffle in two "normal" secret objective cards for each player, the floating Betrayer card may or may not make it into the game. In any given session, you might have a betrayer in your midst—or you might just be paranoid.

The betrayer’s secret objective puts them at odds with the other players, typically forcing them to hoard resources or fulfill some condition that the other players are unaware of. When players contribute cards to each round’s crisis, they do so face-down, which provides the betrayer an opportunity to add negative cards that prevent the colony from succeeding. And the betrayer can generally affect small outcomes throughout the game, sowing discord and mistrust with every move. If the betrayer meets his or her win conditions by the end of the game, all other players lose.

Interestingly, though, the “good” players’ secret objectives also conflict with the overarching goals of the group. Say your secret objective is to stockpile weapons. When you go to the police station to rummage through gun lockers while the rest of the group is searching for medicine to help out with the round’s crisis, you’re going to get some sidelong glances from your fellow colonists. Are you just working on your secret objective, or are you the betrayer? It's almost impossible to know for sure.

Players can build alliances, make and break promises, vote to exile another player—anything they’d like. An exiled player—betrayer or not—gets access to special cards that allow them to work against the colony. You mess with the bull, you get the horns.

If aspects of this sound reminiscent of games like Battlestar Galactica, it’s not by accident. It’s this “are they or aren’t they?” gameplay that makes Dead of Winter really shine. We're already low on supplies, the colony is eating way more food than is sustainable, raiders just attacked via a crisis card, and zombies are surrounding the colony… is Jaben actually working against us?

And with my spare die I will take out the trash

The mechanics of Dead of Winter are easy to understand and fairly typical of a modern board game. The decks of supply cards at each location are fixed, and you’ll probably churn through most of the survivors by your third game. You need to search for supplies to gather resources to fulfill the crisis conditions, but you can also use the cards you get to benefit your survivors. You can equip a shotgun to help a survivor fight zombies, for instance, or spend a fuel card to travel to a location without having to roll the die of doom.

A character's stat card. The lower the number, the better your character is at doing something. Maria Lopez is good at searching, but she might struggle to take down zombies—unless she's at the school.
A character's stat card. The lower the number, the better your character is at doing something. Maria Lopez is good at searching, but she might struggle to take down zombies—unless she's at the school.
How well your survivors search and kill depends on their skill rating, a number that ranges from one to six. At the beginning of each turn, all players roll a number of six-sided dice equal to the number of survivors they control plus one. Those results are then spent over the course of their turn. Results can be modified, and even a lowly one can be used to take care of basic colony tasks, such as clearing waste or setting up barricades. You can bring on more survivors to get more actions, but remember: you have to feed and take care of them. The more mouths to feed, the more time the colony needs to spend looking for food. If people start starving, morale drops quickly.

The game’s “Crossroads Cards” inject a bit of emergent storytelling into the game. Every player’s turn starts with an adjacent player drawing from a sizable deck of cards with story beats that include both good or bad things that can happen to the colony. The cards have triggers, so if a certain survivor isn’t in play or you don’t move to a particular location, for instance, the card’s text is not read. Sometimes bandits attack or a person wanders into the colony with food; other times, players will have to vote on a course of action—all chances for the betrayer to meddle. I once chose to take on some helpless survivors to raise the colony’s morale and was immediately viewed as a potential betrayer, as our food requirements increased as well.

Bring your own story

The game doesn’t provide many details about how the zombie apocalypse came to pass—and it doesn’t really matter—but neither does it invest you much into the setting and, by association, the myriad characters you’ll be controlling. This was a bit disappointing for me, as the named characters really speak to a backstory of how they might be intertwined. When your game includes a mall Santa named Forest Plum whose ability is to raise the colony’s morale when he dies… well, it sure feels like there’s a story to be told here. In other words, you’ll need to provide a lot of your own narrative.

True to form for Plaid Hat Games, the game’s components are top-of-the-line. The cards feature striking artwork from Fernanda Suarez (who also did the art for Plaid Hat’s excellent card game Ashes: Rise of the Pheonixborn), and the boards and other components are high-quality. Early in play, I lamented that the number of zombie standees seemed excessive. When we had our first “Add Zombies” phase and I looked across a board just covered with cardboard zombies, their inclusion made sense.(Finding the survivor standees in a sea of zombies can be difficult—be sure to organize your game well.) Specific Crossroad Cards have a callout for mature content, so you can pull those cards out if you want to play a more family-friendly game.

Dead of Winter does lean heavily on hidden traitor games that came before it, and sessions without a betrayer may fizzle toward the end if players are fairly certain they're playing a fully cooperative game (though surprises do happen). But if a Battlestar Galactica experience in 45 to 90 minutes sounds appealing and you’re more into zombies than infected space stations, Dead of Winter will be right up your alley.

Just keep an eye on your friends as that horde of zombies lumbers toward you—or you may find a knife in your back.

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