RogerBW's Blog

First meeting I've got to for a while, inspired by the bank holiday.

We started off with a five-player game of Dead of Winter, my first time actually playing the game. And I hadn't finished explaining the rules before I drew the Betrayal card out of the secret objectives; I tried not to let it affect the way I put things, though it certainly fed into how much I reminded people of the consequences of their actions later.

Things started off well enough: the first couple of crisis cards weren't major problems. Most of the survivors moved out of the colony into foraging areas. We did have some truly terrible die rolls when killing zombies, though: not so much on the killing, but on the 50/50 roll afterwards to see if they counted towards our goal of 20 useful specimens.

As things moved on, morale even went up briefly (Sophie found the old crop-duster and departed from the game). The stray horse rapidly became horseburgers, which solved our food problems. Still no usefully-killed zombies, though.

This I think was the turning point. We'd already failed one fuel-requiring crisis, and having done so were unable to move. We knew we couldn't hack this one, so lots more zombies were on the way.

And then Rod the truck driver had a heart attack… and the active player chose to try to save him. This meant two exposure rolls for Rod and for the two other survivors who rushed him to the hospital.

Survivor one got bit. Survivor two rolled the dice, and got bit. Survivor three rolled the dice and got away with it. Rod survived. Then the next player's turn came along, and his frostbitten character finally succumbed to his wounds… and that was enough for us to hit zero morale. We didn't even get as far as the twelve-zombie attack. We had fourteen zombie specimens in the end, and we were doing a decent job of killing them without burning too much in the way of resources; if our early dice luck hadn't been so horrible we might even have pulled off a group win.

I only had half of what I needed for the personal win (I'd expected us to last another turn and then go out on the morale failure from zombie attacks) so I didn't win either.

We finished with Treasures and Traps, which was a mildly amusing game of dungeon pillaging, but felt very random. There wasn't really much opportunity to plot beyond your next turn. Not disagreeable, but not one I'd rush out and buy.

And so home to a dinner of oxtail where love is (much better than stalled herbs and hatred therewith).