Welcome to our weekly previews for Dead of Winter: The Long Night, the stand-alone, fully compatible expansion to Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game. Click here to pre-order Dead of Winter: The Long Night from the PlaidHatGames.com store - get 20% off and the Rich Sommer exclusive character and crossroads card for free! Click here to explore MyRaxxon.com.

Now that you have an inkling of what awaits you in Raxxon, it’s time to talk about the second module in Dead of Winter: The Long Night. Just like Raxxon, there is an introductory scenario for the Bandits module. There were a few crossroads cards in the original game that involved other humans out there, still surviving, but now some of them have organized into a rival colony. To us, they’re Bandits.

Two or more appear at the start of each round, taking up spaces normally set aside for your survivors.

You can remove them peacefully…

…or more aggressively. You can use Attack actions to remove them, or ask Rosa Rodriguez what to do with them.

At the end of the round, each bandit sends one item from the top of their respective item deck back to the bandits’ hideout, face up. You can go there and search or attack, rolling your spent die to see what happens.

Each bandit at a location will attract zombies, just as if one of your own survivors were there. In the event of an overrun or bite, your survivors will die first, but if there are only bandits left, they’ll leave.

Speaking of leaving, if a player is exiled and they were not the betrayer, they join the bandits and become their leader. When bandits are placed at the start of a round, the exiled player will choose where they go. Otherwise, the locations of the bandits will be randomly determined, in a way that I shall reveal in a future preview.

The Bandits module can be used on its own, or combined with Raxxon and/or the Improvements Module. One fun interaction with Raxxon is that a bandit at Raxxon will send some of those powerful items back to the bandit hideout, so it’s possible to get Raxxon items without even going to Raxxon! If no one goes to Raxxon, you’ll of course have to deal with those nasty experiments…

Week 1: Why Standalone?

Week 2: Raxxon and Video Trailer

Come back next Wednesday for our next The Long Night preview, on the Improvements module. Click here to pre-order Dead of Winter: The Long Night from the PlaidHatGames.com store - get 20% off and the Rich Sommer exclusive character and crossroads card for free!

