Dem Bones: Dead of Winter

Dead of Winter
Zombie Survival
2-5 Players
Playtime: 30 Minutes to 2 Hours
Designer: Jonathan Gilmour, Isaac Vega
Publisher: Plaid Hat Games
Year of Release: 2014

It takes a while to stop dying in Dead of Winter. It took my group about five or six games before we actually won at all, much less with any frequency. It has an interesting learning curve, we honestly aren't sure what we're doing much different. For me at least I respond to problems as they come up while focusing on the group's current needs and being as stingy with items as possible. I thought that's what I did when we first started playing. But no. We usually wound up getting torn to shreds by the hoards of the undead.

Gameplay consists of using a pool of dice, rolled at the start of the turn, to take various actions. Each dice is good for each action, so planning ahead of time is important. Every turn more zombies show up, as do new challenges affecting the colony. You'll need to be collecting items, dealing with issues, keeping survivors feed, fending off zombies as well as working towards not only the overall goal, but your personal goal as well. All the while someone might be a traitor. Typically in the games I've played the traitor laid low until the bitter end, but it's still one of the more interesting features in the game.

Basically the entire game is just continually responding to a bad situation. Surviving long enough to achieve the current goal is the biggest challenge. For several games this struggle was quite fulfilling, honestly though. I think it might have worn thin for me by now. I've only played around fifteen games, but at times it already felt a little... boring? I don't know how to describe it. The problem really surfaces when trying to play through the missions labelled with a long length of play time. It wound up just coming down to working through the turns waiting to win, we had been on the path towards it for several turns, essentially just killing time waiting to finish. Short and medium length missions haven't really ended with my group feeling as though we were just going through the motions towards the end though. I really enjoy playing Dead of Winter, but shorter bursts are for the better.

I'm not sure what else to say. The components are all serviceable and the atmosphere works for anyone looking for a zombie themed game. It isn't just a mindless action game where you try to kill as many zombies as possible. At times it feels as though you are truly struggling to survive in the zombie apocalypse, which is a feeing I've personally been searching for for a long time. While there are a sea of zombie board games I haven't played, I can confidently still highly recommend this game. Just be aware that the longer the play time, the less enjoyable the game was to play, for my group at least. Also, there's a standalone expansion which includes everything needed to play Dead of Winter called The Last Winter. It adds a decent chunk of new mechanics (like bandits, improving your base and a highly advanced research facility with crazy weapons and dangerous advanced forms of zombies). I haven't had the chance to play it, from what I've heard, it might be worth just picking up The Last Winter instead of the original game.