Pros

First of all, this game just looks and feels great. Everything is really well colored and stands out well with a frosted-over look, and color schemes are good throughout. What’s more, the game comes with enough plastic bags to hold everything so you don’t have to worry about storage.

On top of all that, Dead of Winter has a good rulebook that’s really concise with plenty of pictures and examples. This lines up amazingly with the player aids that are the GOLD standard for aids: they show everything, help you organize your cards, while looking great overall.

Now this is technically a ‘Crossroads’ game, meaning that there’s an event deck of 80 cards that is drawn from every turn, which can potentially trigger if those conditions are met. This is a really cool idea with a massive novelty factor that makes it feel like anything can happen. Survivors can fall in love, survivors can get kidnapped, people can party, yadada we can’t spoil too much. Crossroads will have a decision that will either be made by the survivor involved, or the group as a whole, which give you gripping decisions like: getting mauled by zombies or shot by bandits—man both these options suck. This makes the game feel VERY alive, like an actual zombie apocalypse with unexpected twists and turns.

There’s also 30 unique survivors, each with their own stats and special abilities that feel thematically appropriate. There’s a fitness trainer who has more health, a soldier who can kill 2 zombies with one die, or a chemist that can make a homemade bomb (Walter White lookalike). More diversity comes in with searching from items: Shotguns, Books on martial arts, a Megaphone, and even finding more survivors to join you! Searching really does feel like searching, where it can be hard to find what you’re looking for.

The traitor mechanic is a fantastic idea too, where it’s not an all out sabotage mission, because this traitor still has their own hidden agenda they have to complete before tanking everyone. So, everyone, good guys or not, is working towards their own hidden agendas, and there’s this semi-coop mistrust where all the good guys STILL DO need each other to win despite occasional irrational behavior from objectives. You always have to watch out for the off chance that your suddenly strangely acting friend is also a bad guy.

Exiling someone if you REALLY think they’re a bad guy is also fun, where the group calls a vote and kicks someone out. That exiled person isn’t eliminated, but rather they get a new ‘Exiled’ Objective, and don’t have to worry about feeding the Main Colony anymore. This can start to change the game, with some extremely violent revenge objectives possible.

As a whole, Dead of Winter does uncertainty really well with how it can be just as risky as it can be forgiving. Tons of things in the game like attacking or moving force you to roll the Exposure Die, which has effects ranging from doing nothing, to instantly killing your survivor and spreading the infection in their location to potentially kill even more… but who knows, maybe moving to the Grocery Store yields a Food item worth 3 food instead of 1! The risk keeps you engaged into the high-stakes zombie apocalypse, but then you’ll never get completely wiped out as you control multiple survivors, which is relieving in this multiple hour game.

Ultimately, Dead of Winter’s strengths come together to create really fun stories, because everything is so interconnected. The hidden objectives lead to fun motivations that will surprise you with what funny situations end up happening. Things on the board like the Main Objective, Crises, Food, and Morale, are just fluff to fuel your discussions, giving you resources to care about when things go well, or horribly wrong.

Cons & Nitpicks

Things can start to get a little wonky with the personal goal balance though, with some of them being WAY too easy, which is problematic because easy objectives don’t cause group conflict, since they don’t force weird behavior. Doing something like, having 4 Barricades in the Main Colony, is something that people are gonna do anyways, so you could fulfill it without doing anything! There should NEVER be an objective that you can can fulfill without having to out of your way to do it.

The big bad con is… the Betrayer in Dead of Winter breaks the game, they are just WAY too strong. Once a Betrayer does their necessary objective they can just easily tank Morale and suddenly win: there’s EIGHT ways we could easily find in our video at the very least. The fact is that being a traitor is a big mess, where we can’t take out the ‘tanking’ actions, since Non-Betrayers need to be able to perform them beneficially or against each other when Exile votes fail.

Needless to say, it’s pretty frequent that once you all know how to play the game, the Betrayer who has finished their typically harder-than-usual objective mid to late game can do some pretty basic setup before suddenly plummeting the Morale and winning the game instantly. This results in the social deduction aspect of Dead of Winter being weaker than expected, as games can often play fairly normally without any suspicious sabotaging going on, making everyone think there isn’t a traitor, and then suddenly BAM George suddenly drops Morale by 3 on his turn and instantly wins the game out of nowhere.

Funnily enough, Dead of Winter is at it’s best when the THREAT of a Betrayer exists, but then plays better when there actually isn’t a Betrayer. You can’t just play full co-op and remove Betrayer cards, since that would make the game too easy, and loses some of its charm of players being suspicious of one another. This Betrayer problem single-handedly drives down this Recommender Score so much for being so dysfunctional, despite being so core to the game.

Replayability is also actually really poor, despite there looking like this game has a lot of ‘stuff’ at first glance. Sure, there’s 10 scenarios, with plenty of survivors, and cards, but the hype from seeing repeated hyper specific events and motivations in objectives and crossroads dies down fast. You’ll probably end up seeing everything there is to see after a handful of playthroughs.

More Dead of Winter

There is an expansion called The Long Night that has more of EVERYTHING: more items, Crisis Cards, survivors, enemy types, and Objectives, which generally helps incite more repeated plays once you mash them into the base Dead of Winter. Either of the Dead of Winter boxes individually feels like you’re playing a demo. Please keep in mind that the long night makes the zaniness of Dead of Winter go through the roof, with special zombies, sci-fi weapons, and even a chimp to play.

No joke, the Dead of Winter experience when combining base game and The Long Night shoots up to an 8, maybe even a 9 if you don’t consider it as a social deduction game and more as a semi co-op… though The Long Night does introduce it’s own balancing issues in that the survivors get really overpowered… so the game can be too easy if there isn’t a Betrayer so now there’s a really dumb inverse problem… god Dead of Winter sucks at balancing itself, but it really isn’t about balance if you haven’t figured it out by now.