Left 4 Dead but Tabletop: Dead of Winter

Introduction
About
Game Variants
Interesting Feature
Game End
Thoughts

1. Introduction

The zombie apocalypse theme is well known in movies, series, and games. If you enjoy playing Left 4 Dead or watching The Walking Dead series, you’ll love Dead of Winter; it’s like playing the game on a tabletop. It feels like you’re in a zombie apocalyptic movie, but you’re making the decisions for your characters that you control, and every decision you make has its own consequences. This is not a tutorial for Dead of Winter, but if you want us to make one, please let us know in the comments under this article.

2. About

Published by Plaid Hat Games, Dead of Winter, you can play with up to five people and try to survive a hazardous winter in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse. Everyone will each control one or more survivors (characters), and each of the players will have their own group of people.
Each survivor will have their own set of unique traits that can benefit your gameplay. What makes it more interesting is that you can play a game variant where one of the groups can betray a colony and try to sabotage the colony. Imagine playing Mafia or Werewolf, but with a zombie plot.

The mechanics of the game are well thought out, and there are so many actions you can take, such as searching for food, using raw meat to distract zombies, and even attacking other people for your own advantage.
Each time you take an action that has the possibility of encountering a zombie, you’ll need to roll an exposure die to determine whether you’re safe, injured, frostbitten, or bitten by zombies and spread the infection to other survivors in that location. If too many people die, there’s a high chance that you’ll lose the game.

There’s a bunch of main objective options, from short games to long ones, that you can choose from. Each player will follow the same main objective.

3. Game Variants

There are five ways to play this game:

1. Co-Op Variant

Everyone will work together to achieve the main objective. It’s either everyone wins or loses at the same time. There are certain cards you need to put away during the setup because some of them are for other variants.

2. Player Variant

If you don’t have enough friends, are an only child, and your parents are divorced, you can still play this game with your mom! It follows the same rules as the Co-Op Variant but is a little bit different for the setup.

3. Betrayer Variant

For me, this is the best variant and the one I played the most. Each player will receive a secret objective card that you cannot show to other players for obvious reasons. Everyone will still work together to achieve the main objective, but all of you will have your own selfish mission that you want to complete. Even worse (in a good way) than that, one of the players may be a betrayal and can ruin the main objective so that they can win the game by themselves. The end of the game will have either everyone winning, everyone losing, some winning, some losing, or only the betrayal winning.

4. Hardcore Variant

If it’s not your 10th time playing the game, I do not recommend playing this variant. Each main objective card has a hardcore mode at the back, which increases the difficulty significantly. Unless you have memorised every possible action that you can take and are able to strategize well, feel free to play this variant. But be warned, it is really hardcore.

5. Player Elimination Variant

This variant is to be combined with other variants. The standard situation is that if a player loses all of the survivors that they control, they’ll lose their item cards in hand and draw a new survivor card to continue playing. But for this variant, once you run out of survivors, you’re basically out of the game for being too weak.

4. Interesting Feature

What makes this game extra enjoyable are the crossroad cards. Each turn, there’s a chance a sudden event may happen, depending on the condition of the gameplay written on the card. These turns of events will definitely spice up your gameplay and make you think harder about your next move.

5. Game End

There are a few ways for the game to end:

The morale level reached 0 (zero).
The round tracker reached 0 (zero).
Main objective completed.

Once the game ends (if you’re playing variants that require secret objectives), everyone will show their secret objective card to see who achieved their own selfish mission.

At this moment, every truth and dark turn came to light, as you noticed some players may not contribute their item cards for the team because they want to win for themselves.

6. Thoughts

This game is very complex and quite hard for beginners to learn. We recommend this only for those who are experienced in board games.

For the beginners out there, don’t worry. If your will is strong, you can try to learn and play the game; if not, we recommend you start with another board game called Horrified. It is not too similar to Dead of Winter, but it can be an introduction to a strategy-based co-op board game with less complicated rules.

Overall, this game is great, and we highly recommend you guys try and play. Let us know in the comments if there’s any question or if you have a request on what we should cover next!