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 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.