Gaming in A Time of Quarantine: Dead of Winter

In this strange and new time, we all look for areas of escape.  If your reading this, your normal mode of escape is probably board games.  Most board games have one flaw in this era of social distancing; you need other people to play them.  Now, I know all you solo gamers out there are yelling, “DON’T YOU FORGET ABOUT US!” and don’t worry! I’m not! I’m one of you!  Solo games have been a sanity-saver in this time where were all trying to do our part to contain the effects of this virus.  But not everyone has the patience to get the game out of the box if it’s not with a group of friends.  And, some don’t like to play against the simple AI that is usually present in solo implementations.  Look for a solo game roundup sometime in the near future!

                The new hotness in the time of social distancing, is clearly online board games.  If you’re a member of the Quackalope discord, (and if you aren’t and you’re reading this, go join!) you already know that Tabletop Simulator (TTS for the rest of this article, no need to pad word count) is the platform of choice for us quacklings. Recently, I was able to get in a game of Dead of Winter, and older classic that has been a part of my personal collection.  My group had decided upon it after a failed attempt at Gloomhaven.  Turns out that not knowing how to play first really makes it a bit difficult!

                Dead of Winter is a super-thematic zombie apocalypse cooperative game with a hidden traitor. In it, you are a group of survivors of the zombie apocalypse, doing your best to survive the harsh reality of a cold, cold winter.  This game has all the zombie horror tropes, from the characters, to the setting, to the detailed character and zombie standees, and all of the great (if gruesome) illustrations that are presented throughout the game.  I personally have the stand-alone expansion for Dead of Winter, called The Long Night, and it features more characters, (which are usable in both games) and introduces the shadowy Raxxon Corporation, the originators of the zombie outbreak.  Along with an expansion that allows you to pit the two colonies together, (playing each stand-alone version against each other, kind of a team-versus-team game) and a stand-alone game that features Raxxon, the rabbit hole is deep to take a dive into this IP, produced and published by Plaid Hat games. 

                Dead of Winter was also one of the first titles I got to expand my growing game library, which now stands at 111. (humblebrag, couldn’t resist 😉) It was one of the first games my game group really got invested in, spurred on by its inclusion on Wil Wheaton’s YouTube show Tabletop, which had started my entry into the hobby in general.  Back in those days, it seemed to hit the table with frequency, especially given the fact that we kept losing.  In fact, it came to the point that my friend and I went to a board game café (The wonderful Board and Brew in College Park, Maryland) just to be able to table it between the two of us and get it beaten.  We still almost lost.  But we won!  And no one was the traitor!  Quite a good stroke of luck that.

                So now, here we were in the middle of the pandemic, utterly unprepared to play Gloomhaven, and what were we to do?  Both me and my friend suggested Dead of Winter.  It had been a long time since we had played, and the workshop mod he had downloaded was at least partially automated, so that made setup a breeze.  We were playing in no time. We decided, since we had nowhere else to go, that we should try one of the longer objective cards.  We usually play on the short game objective cards when we get together in order to get as many plays of things in a possible.  For this objective, we had to have there be no more than three zombies in locations outside the colony.  At first this seemed to be super simple, I thought we would have no problem in eradicating the zombie horde.

                Then, as it always does, the stark reality of the game hit upon us.  Because you check for completion of the main objective as the last step of a round, zombies were always going to spawn before we had a chance to see if we had won.  And because one zombie shows up in each location that is not the central colony, we had to plan to have no more than three people outside the colony at the end of that phase, and that there were no zombies around elsewhere or we would never be able to win the game!  Unfortunately, it took us nearly until the end of the game to figure that out. 

                One of the ways that Dead of Winter mixes up the cooperative format is the hidden traitor mechanic.  At the start of the game, each player selects a secret objective, which they need to complete to truly ‘win’ the game. Most of these hidden objectives are compatible with the team winning the scenario, but in each game, there is at least one ‘betrayal!’ card that can win you the game if the whole team loses, but you have filled your objectives.  In our game, we didn’t have any actual betrayers, but the need and want to complete your secret objective can make you seem like you are not playing for the team.  For instance, my hidden objective was to have twelve different survivors in the game at the end of the game (the name of the card was ‘repopulate’ haha).  Unfortunately, this didn’t jive so well with the overall game, as each new survivor had to be fed, and we had SO MANY crisis cards that were food related.  So naturally, we starved a couple of times (much like any Uwe Rosenburg game, you gotta feed your people! Even if that food is half a tin of beans).

                However, with more than few lucky card draws, and some heavy firepower, (seriously, that sniper rifle is OP!) we were able to turn the tide, and ultimately survive the Dead of Winter.   It worked surprisingly well on TTS, and was easy to get in there and get some good gaming in.  If you own this game, you know one of the major problems with it, (and some games in general) is set up and tear down.  Now, if we were using a mod that didn’t already have setup mostly scripted, that would also have been a slog on TTS, but fortunately that didn’t end up being a problem.  Since there is a lot of text in this game, there is a lot of hovering over cards and boards to see what is going on. If you don’t mind that, Dead of Winter is still a blast to play on TTS.

                So, after initially not knowing if I would enjoy TTS and online board games, I can officially say that it’s…….. it’s ok.  I play board games in order to interact with more people.  I’m not the most extroverted person in the world, so playing board games allows me to be more out there and interact with more people, through a medium that I like a lot.  TTS just doesn’t do that for you.  I was able to hear my friends through a discord chat, but there’s really something missing by not being able to look them in the face to see if that card they are contributing to the crisis is REALLY a food like they said it was.  Also, I have an ancient computer that’s not good for much else than word processing, that doesn’t help.  But, in a pinch, and until we can once again visit our friends at our Friendly Local Game Stores, (shout out to Labyrinth Games and Puzzles in Washington, DC!) give it a try.  It might just help you beat those quarantine blues.