RogerBW's Blog

I've missed a few Reading sessions lately (with holidays and such). This time, with just three of us present, we played Dead of Winter.

We decided to keep this one in coop mode, which meant dropping a couple of the characters and quite a few of the crossroads cards.

We shuffled short and medium objectives, and drew the goal of emptying two locations of their cards. With the librarian and nurse in play with their enhanced search capabilities, the hospital and library seemed like good places to start.

But then came the Great Library Massacre: the doctor bitten while travelling took out the cute librarian, who then bit the mayor, so on the second turn we were down to three. (Good thing we knew we had no Betrayer goals out, or Matt would probably have been thrown out for that.)

We struggled on, with Paul concentrating on searches and ending up with a huge hand of survivors. With the farmer in play we managed to empty the grocery store. That left the hospital, being ransacked by nurse and student. On the final turn, Good Things suddenly started happening with our action dice.

We ended up using sixes for everything including rubbish clearance, abandoned the grocery store, got everything out of the hospital that could be got, and had enough barricades to keep the zombies out of the colony until the end of the turn. Unfortunately my personal victory condition had been to have four barricades intact at the colony, but we still had a group win.

Rather fewer crossroads cards went active this time; last time it seemed that almost every turn had a crossroads, but this time it was more like one in three, and none of them particularly terrible. (The feral children got abandoned again. Quite right too.)