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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 - Jonathan Gilmour and Isaac VegaPlaid Hat Games2-5 (best at 3+)14+45 to 90 minutes: $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.

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.

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?