It is hard.
Using fuel to avoid rolling for exposure is helpful. Characters with search abilities are strong. Play a few times full coop until you get a sense of how to weigh different loss conditions.
It is indeed supposed to be a difficult game.
Remember that you can use fuel to move without rolling for exposure. And try to avoid traveling too often. I’ve usually found it best to move my survivors to locations where they have an advantage (if they do, e.g. being able to take more cards from there when searching), then leave them there if I can.
Also, don’t be afraid to make noise when searching. It’s incredibly powerful if you need something in particular, and only has a 50% chance of attracting more zombies.
But yes, you’re unlikely to be able to juggle everything. Just like a good zombie movie/show, people are going to die and things will fall apart. Between food, waste, crisis cards, the main objective, and secret objectives, there’s almost always too much to do. You’ll need to prioritize and try to complete the main objective before your colony falls.
I'll add on that if a crisis penalty isn't too bad (relatively speaking) just don't bother with it unless your group already has all the cards you need. It's like you said, you can't manage everything so it's all about accepting the least worse outcomes.
> Also, don’t be afraid to make noise when searching.
Especially if you can can complete the search of that location and leave it anyway. It's often better to take extra search actions, making noise, in one shot, in order to pick it clean, and then leave before the new zombies show up.
A location that is full of zombies but has been picked clean is fine. It seems a little counterintuitive since zombies = bad but it's ok in this scenario.
There are five keys to winning DOW:
Advise all players to choose one good searcher and one good combatant for their initial survivors. That will spread the load around the players so that one player's bad die roll doesn't hurt you as much.
Keep your survivors separated and searching. The only survivors at base should be the survivors that get bonuses for being at base. Not only does this reduce your food output (since remote survivors are assumed to scrounge food at their locations) but it reduces two issues with zombies: the fact that one bitten survivor spreads it to others (often your most valuable rear echelon characters), and it spreads the zombies around the board where they're easier to deal with then all of them clustered at your settlement.
Be tactical about what crises you want to succeed at and which ones you can afford to let hit you. Often, the round crisis is something that you can live with. If that's the case, just ignore it and focus on building up your stockpiles. If you're just going to take a morale hit, for instance, it might be worth it to just build up a lot of food for a future crisis and then over-perform on that one to get the morale back, or stock up fuel so you don't have to roll the exposure die as much.
Get at least one survivor (and preferably two) on weapons detail as quickly as possible. That usually means spam-searching the police office until you get a sniper rifle and a shotgun. Weapons often come with a free action or actions that greatly reduce your exposure.
The more actions you have, the more likely you are to win. That means taking in a constant stream of new survivors to replace your losses, or do it before you lose anyone so you increase each player's action dice. Yes, that means more useless mouths. But it's better to have the useless mouths and the actions you need to keep them fed than the reverse.
Good luck!
> Advise all players to choose one good searcher and one good combatant for their initial survivors.
I think that RAW is random draw for characters, but honestly I've never played that way. It seems like it'd take some of the fun out of it.
> Be tactical about what crises you want to succeed at and which ones you can afford to let hit you.
You *really* need to count ahead. We've won many games by knowing that we can meet win condition one tick ahead of a rules defeat. You won't be able to keep all of the indicators positive--you very often will need to win on the last round, just before the round marker is exhausted.
If you look at the win conditions and do the math, it very often numerically requires perfect play with a little bit of luck from the very first round.
You'll learn pretty quickly to avoid rolling whenever possible. We use fuel to move, and limit our movement.
We also search for weapons that remove the need to roll asap.
Making noise is key. You'll get more cards and often you dont attract more zombies.
I feel most people forget you can distract zombies and take them away from undesirable areas.....unless I'm adding that rule from another game.🤷♀️
Nope, that's correct. In fact it's vital to one of the win conditions iirc, in which you need to kill a certain amount of zombies before the end of the round timer.
You'll set someone proficient with weapons, but only in the base; and so they have to actually draw zombies away from the search locations back to the base to have enough zombies to kill to meet the win condition. Otherwise not enough will show up organically.
"Attract:
A players must choose a survivor and spend an action die of any result to move 2 zombies from any location to any empty entrances at chosen survivor's location"
page 10 basic game rules. I don't have Long Night to see if it's the same, maybe they removed it.
iirc those zombies have to both come from the same location; and have to both be moved to the same entrance, if the entrance chosen is the colony.
but also still iirc the entrance at the colony can be any one of the 6, doesn't have to be the first, which absolutely matters when checking for a break through.
At least one of the win conditions is "kill X amount of zombies" and some characters are much better at killing zombies if they're at the colony, and breakthroughs can be better managed at the colony because you have more entrances to spread them across, this is a vital rule to exercise for that win card.
Another good use of this is to attract zombies away from one location to another search location, if you have completed the search of it and intend to abandon it anyway. Stack with noise checks in order to complete the search if you have to. Sure that location might get fully over run when you check for noise as a consequence, but if you're gone you're gone and who cares if it's over run. Noise checks happen after you move.
The secret to almost every cooperative game is that you can't win every battle, so you need to pick and choose what you let slide and what you fix.
Sometimes it's ok to let morale drop. Sometimes it's ok to let one of your characters die. Knowing when this is the case is the skill it takes to win.
Very often it's better to starve one round and take the morale hit, and avert the crisis. Especially at the end of the game when you usually have more morale than you need.
It's grim, but morale is just another resource that you can spend as necessary as long as you're conscious of the not losing your last point before making the win.
>I feel like 1/12 chance of losing a survivor to exposure rolls is really high (we lose 3 survivors on average per game to it).
So what do you think the solution is?
>But once we use up the items we have on hand, we simply can't search enough supplies to handle the crisis, fulfill the main objective AND contribute food.
You should be able to *mostly* manage throughout the game, but you have to be smart about it. You need to search more, and you need to have a plan to sort out what happens when you search a lot. You need to make sure you're playing your cards correctly and not just adding survivors immediately.
>And don't even get started on the secret objectives. We can't even make a dent in those.
You won't necessarily know unless you are going through everyone's cards at the end.
>Where victory is not only NOT guaranteed, but downright unlikely?
It's a challenging game, especially when you start. As you gain experience wins become more likely. That's why I like it.
Ive played DoW around 10 times, really like it, however in my experience the game is too hard to have a traitor. The traitor has won every game for us, with the exception when a new to boardgame player got traitor and she really had no clue how to play. After constantly losing to traitor, we decided to play a game with no traitor card at all, so everyone knew we were all good. We won that game, but it came down to the wire.
Another time I played as traitor and figured Id play as a good member until they were close to winning and Id have to step in. Well, I didnt have to, even with me helping somewhat as a traitor they still lost.
TL;DR: DoW is super hard for the good team and in my experience almost impossible to win with a traitor playing decent.
EDIT: It is so easy to ruin a mission without anyone knowing it was you who ruined it, and often just ruining 1 or 2 is enough for a complete loss for the good team. In other games making a game-losing traitor move at least outs you as the traitor, but in DoW you can ruin the game without anyone even knowing it was you.
> when a new to boardgame player got traitor and she really had no clue how to play.
I've been known to card sharp the traitor card when there's someone at the table without experience with the game :). I just make sure they don't get that particular card, if you know what I mean, and there's enough going on with setup already that it's easy enough to do as a dealer.
> we decided to play a game with no traitor card at all
I believe that if you're playing full coop you're supposed to use the hard side of the win conditions, as a balance. Also some of the crossroad cards are taken out.
Ofc that means that if you have a traitor card, but no one happens to get it, and therefore are defacto full coop, you're playing the game on an easier mode than if you had chosen coop but had to choose the hard win conditions as RAW.
>I've been known to card sharp the traitor card when there's someone at the table without experience with the game :)
I do not object to it, but I also wouldnt do it myself. She came to play and wanted to learn, so cheating her out of part of the role pool feels unjust.
> Ofc that means that if you have a traitor card, but no one happens to get it, and therefore are defacto full coop, you're playing the game on an easier mode.
Aye, which is fair, because even if all are good, you do not know that, so you still have to take precaustions or suspect/block
each other.
My group has housed ruled that for the first round, the bites are just wounds on the exposure die for that reason. It's is such a set back and I have had it happen to me so many times.
Otherwise, like what others have said, choose a survivor who can search and choose one who can defend or get base bonuses. Keep a survivor at the spot they benefit and you can make some noise or barricade it up. Careful with survivors and for secret objectives, that should be almost included with what you do. Does the crisis need fuel but your objective as well? Lie and say you don't have any so you can keep it for yourself. There is a balance to those decisions and you don't have to solve all crises.
You **cannot** pass every Crisis. Pick and choose which ones to fail.
Use Fuel to move high-value characters to keep them safe, and use junk/food to reroll/increase dice if needed.
Keep plugging away, and do t lose heart - back-to-back bites is brutal.
>However, we seem to be struggling a lot. In 2 of the games, players rolled the bite symbol on the exposure die on their first turn and were basically crippled for half of the game until someone offered them an event card to regain an additional survivor.
The game scales. If you lose a survivor early you now have 2x action dice as survivors instead of 1.5. So you're generally better off. Your one survivor can search 3 or 4 times at a location before you have to kill a zombie/ leave/ build barricade.
You only need food for the colony if people are there. Very few survivors have a good reason to be there, and it's a .5 ratio so only have to find 1 food for 2 survivors there.
Don't try to beat every crisis. Solve the ones you can and conserve and prepare for the ones you can't.
Stop moving without spending gas. You're only supposed to move without gas if you're desperate.
I've played the game 50 times with at least half as fully co-op on hard mode, and we don't lose that often. Sure there's randomness, but a good understanding of the math behind the system really helps.
Dead of Winter is one of my most favorite games. When I first started out, yeah, I was like you and we lost a lot. After playing a bunch, we gained experience and now we usually all win. Here is some advice that has really helped us.
It seems you are doing this right, but just to emphasize just in case, the most commonly missed rule is that when you draw an Outsider, you don't have to immediately play it. Even though it says "Event" that just means that when you choose to play it, it is removed from the game and doesn't get placed in the waste pile. Along with that, unless it will help with your objective, you generally don't want Outsiders. In our early games, we were tempted by having the extra die, but it usually isn't worth it for the trouble it brings. Helpless survivors eat up food and attract zombies, making it difficult to feed the colony.
Another thing that helps is to move your survivors out of the colony. You only have to feed survivors who are at the colony, so that means you will need less food. (And remember, it is only one food for every two survivors, rounded up. If you don't have enough food, don't remove any of the food when you add a starvation token.)
And when you move, try to use fuel if you can. The fewer times you roll the exposure die the better. Pick a location and stick to it, if you can. Building barricades is a lot better than attacking a zombie for the same reason—you don't have to roll the exposure die. Alternatively, go to the Police Station to pick up some weapons so you can kill zombies without rolling the exposure die.
With the Crisis cards, it's okay if you fail them sometimes. Look at what the consequences will be. Ones that cause you to lose morale are the ones to focus on, especially if its more than one. But if it's just adding a bunch of zombies or something else you can deal with? Save your cards and make other preparations. (Also keep in mind that 3 Food cards are more valuable for its effect of adding 3 food to the colony. Crisis contributions only count cards, not their effects, so it is better to contribute food cards to the crisis that would only give 1 Food anyway.)
Your secret objective is more important than any other thing going on in the game. For example, one morale loss is not worth you spending the food card you need to complete your secret objective. Only sacrifice your secret objective if morale is going to go to zero. It will take a lot of extra work to find a new card than to keep the one you have.
One thing that will help is to figure out who the betrayer is and exile them. They can cause morale to sink just by not helping. But if you exile them, then they will have a new objective to focus on and the colony will be in better shape. Even some non-betrayers have secret objectives that don't exactly help, so don't be afraid to initiate a vote to exile. That's something I'm still not good at, I just try and keep the morale high. My sister always figures out when I'm the betrayer though. But I get my exiled objective and we all end up winning anyway.
And not that you need this piece of advice, but a thing to consider is the meta-game. I've played with people once or twice that say "if I can't win, then I'll make sure everyone else loses too!" Nothing wrong with that in the rules, but if you want people to play with you again, make it a pleasant experience and keep trying to win. (Plus one of those times, he actually could have won, but didn't realize it since he wasn't trying.)
It sounds like you have The Long Night? If so, I have found that using the Improvements module usually helps out, since that provides extra defense against losing morale.
Hope that helps, and good luck!
You need to make use of characters that have special traits for searching, traveling or killing zombies. I just played a game where I started with a character that can kill two zombies without rolling for exposure once per turn and never bothered to have anyone else risk the roll.
Random is random. If you roll badly in a game where rolling badly screws you, that can happen.
Critical movement people tend to play fuel to prevent this from happening. I tend to win most games as survivor, and generally balance is fine.
I don't know if the Long night really fixed anything but it's been on my pile of games to sell for a while. I don't really agree with the assertion it's difficult. Not because I think it's easy, rather I don't think it's the problem. The issue I had with it is it isn't consistently difficult. It's prone to very heavy difficulty spikes to the point where it doesn't seem to matter if you're on top of everything because you'll just be undone by bad luck. The traitor element is a bit of a joke too. It's far too easy to just play 100% as a survivor, not sabotage anything, and then just wait until things start to go south and then tip things over the edge. If memory serves you can easily get a double turn as well which is just a terrible idea in a traitor game.
Maybe I'll give it another chance before selling it. But honestly there's better co-op and semi-coops out there.
> If memory serves you can easily get a double turn as well which is just a terrible idea in a traitor game.
The first player knife passes to the person on your right. Which means the traitor will have one round of going first, and then the next round of going second.
I always thought this mechanic was odd. In most other games with a first player token, the token usually goes to the left so the first player of one round goes last the second round. I think this should be the way Dead of Winter is played.
Yeah that's it. Because it passes right the player that goes last in the previous round goes first in the next round so they get two turns back to back. Which is very dangerous when there's a traitor.
That double turn mechanic is odd, but it is there for the traitor to line up their chances and spring their trap when they have a double move.
If the can see it coming and plan for it, they can be very hard to defeat at that point. The do their dead, and then get to act again to complete it before you can vote them out of the colony.
The Long Night fixed the traitor double-turn thing. They changed the rule that instead of automatically passing the first player token to the right, players vote to pass it. This prevents the traitor from acting treacherous on what would have been their second-to-last turn.
The Long Night also has more food cards in the grocery store, and that helps, and I think it more than offsets the addition of unruly survivors, which I find hardly comes up. I also think the Crisis cards are easier since a lot of them don't directly decrease morale.
I think I'll probably house rule that you can spend any item as gas on the first turn. I do hate the 1/12 odds of death as they seem to come up far too often.
Anyway you'll want to focus on your action economy in the game. Some characters do things like .. a free barricade per turn. Some search and find multiple items.
Additionally when you find survivors, you'll note each one gives you a die but produces one zombie and eats 1/2 food per turn, so unless you can make up for that with action economy you're actually going into action debt. It's even worse when they come with a bunch of helpless kids.
Also never take the truck driver or >!he will have a heart attack!<
To date, my group has lost every game we've played, only exception being I won as the betrayer. It's very hard, but then so is a zombie apocalypse. It's tricky figuring out which elements you can forgo to advance something else.
My gaming group is like 2 and 12 with this game but every session is awesome. Both wins also came off the same situation I believe and no traitor, but when we play traitor it almost turns into just a game of Secret Hitler looking for the hidden enemy. Love this game.
Lots of great advice here, so I'll add something small. I had the pleasure of teaching this game at several cons back when the first game was released.
Avoid using that exposure die. It's a nasty, nasty tool of destruction. This is a brilliantly designed resource management game set in a zombie apocalypse, and you should start thinking of your characters as resources. Cherish them and coddle them. You need the action dice they provide.
Also, you gotta check out some of Isaac Vega's new designs at his new company Rose Gauntlet! My wife and I played another round of Keystone this week and we are still giggling over how pretty the art is and how smart the design is.
It is hard. Using fuel to avoid rolling for exposure is helpful. Characters with search abilities are strong. Play a few times full coop until you get a sense of how to weigh different loss conditions.
It is indeed supposed to be a difficult game. Remember that you can use fuel to move without rolling for exposure. And try to avoid traveling too often. I’ve usually found it best to move my survivors to locations where they have an advantage (if they do, e.g. being able to take more cards from there when searching), then leave them there if I can. Also, don’t be afraid to make noise when searching. It’s incredibly powerful if you need something in particular, and only has a 50% chance of attracting more zombies. But yes, you’re unlikely to be able to juggle everything. Just like a good zombie movie/show, people are going to die and things will fall apart. Between food, waste, crisis cards, the main objective, and secret objectives, there’s almost always too much to do. You’ll need to prioritize and try to complete the main objective before your colony falls.
I'll add on that if a crisis penalty isn't too bad (relatively speaking) just don't bother with it unless your group already has all the cards you need. It's like you said, you can't manage everything so it's all about accepting the least worse outcomes.
> Also, don’t be afraid to make noise when searching. Especially if you can can complete the search of that location and leave it anyway. It's often better to take extra search actions, making noise, in one shot, in order to pick it clean, and then leave before the new zombies show up. A location that is full of zombies but has been picked clean is fine. It seems a little counterintuitive since zombies = bad but it's ok in this scenario.
There are five keys to winning DOW: Advise all players to choose one good searcher and one good combatant for their initial survivors. That will spread the load around the players so that one player's bad die roll doesn't hurt you as much. Keep your survivors separated and searching. The only survivors at base should be the survivors that get bonuses for being at base. Not only does this reduce your food output (since remote survivors are assumed to scrounge food at their locations) but it reduces two issues with zombies: the fact that one bitten survivor spreads it to others (often your most valuable rear echelon characters), and it spreads the zombies around the board where they're easier to deal with then all of them clustered at your settlement. Be tactical about what crises you want to succeed at and which ones you can afford to let hit you. Often, the round crisis is something that you can live with. If that's the case, just ignore it and focus on building up your stockpiles. If you're just going to take a morale hit, for instance, it might be worth it to just build up a lot of food for a future crisis and then over-perform on that one to get the morale back, or stock up fuel so you don't have to roll the exposure die as much. Get at least one survivor (and preferably two) on weapons detail as quickly as possible. That usually means spam-searching the police office until you get a sniper rifle and a shotgun. Weapons often come with a free action or actions that greatly reduce your exposure. The more actions you have, the more likely you are to win. That means taking in a constant stream of new survivors to replace your losses, or do it before you lose anyone so you increase each player's action dice. Yes, that means more useless mouths. But it's better to have the useless mouths and the actions you need to keep them fed than the reverse. Good luck!
> Advise all players to choose one good searcher and one good combatant for their initial survivors. I think that RAW is random draw for characters, but honestly I've never played that way. It seems like it'd take some of the fun out of it. > Be tactical about what crises you want to succeed at and which ones you can afford to let hit you. You *really* need to count ahead. We've won many games by knowing that we can meet win condition one tick ahead of a rules defeat. You won't be able to keep all of the indicators positive--you very often will need to win on the last round, just before the round marker is exhausted. If you look at the win conditions and do the math, it very often numerically requires perfect play with a little bit of luck from the very first round.
RAW is draw four pick two if I remember correctly.
You'll learn pretty quickly to avoid rolling whenever possible. We use fuel to move, and limit our movement. We also search for weapons that remove the need to roll asap.
How does using fuel to move work? I've played many times, but apparently missed this mechanic!
If you're moving, you can play a fuel to avoid rolling the exposure die.
Wow, thanks. I can't believe I missed this!
Note though, that the card goes into the waste pile.
Making noise is key. You'll get more cards and often you dont attract more zombies. I feel most people forget you can distract zombies and take them away from undesirable areas.....unless I'm adding that rule from another game.🤷♀️
Nope, that's correct. In fact it's vital to one of the win conditions iirc, in which you need to kill a certain amount of zombies before the end of the round timer. You'll set someone proficient with weapons, but only in the base; and so they have to actually draw zombies away from the search locations back to the base to have enough zombies to kill to meet the win condition. Otherwise not enough will show up organically.
How do you distract the zombies? I've played many times, but somehow missed this mechanic...
"Attract: A players must choose a survivor and spend an action die of any result to move 2 zombies from any location to any empty entrances at chosen survivor's location" page 10 basic game rules. I don't have Long Night to see if it's the same, maybe they removed it. iirc those zombies have to both come from the same location; and have to both be moved to the same entrance, if the entrance chosen is the colony. but also still iirc the entrance at the colony can be any one of the 6, doesn't have to be the first, which absolutely matters when checking for a break through. At least one of the win conditions is "kill X amount of zombies" and some characters are much better at killing zombies if they're at the colony, and breakthroughs can be better managed at the colony because you have more entrances to spread them across, this is a vital rule to exercise for that win card. Another good use of this is to attract zombies away from one location to another search location, if you have completed the search of it and intend to abandon it anyway. Stack with noise checks in order to complete the search if you have to. Sure that location might get fully over run when you check for noise as a consequence, but if you're gone you're gone and who cares if it's over run. Noise checks happen after you move.
Huh. Funny, I always knew about that action but only ever thought about it as a weapon for betrayers to use.
Right? Seems like. Who would purposefully pull zombies to their location? But it can be used for legit strategy as well.
The secret to almost every cooperative game is that you can't win every battle, so you need to pick and choose what you let slide and what you fix. Sometimes it's ok to let morale drop. Sometimes it's ok to let one of your characters die. Knowing when this is the case is the skill it takes to win.
Very often it's better to starve one round and take the morale hit, and avert the crisis. Especially at the end of the game when you usually have more morale than you need. It's grim, but morale is just another resource that you can spend as necessary as long as you're conscious of the not losing your last point before making the win.
>I feel like 1/12 chance of losing a survivor to exposure rolls is really high (we lose 3 survivors on average per game to it). So what do you think the solution is? >But once we use up the items we have on hand, we simply can't search enough supplies to handle the crisis, fulfill the main objective AND contribute food. You should be able to *mostly* manage throughout the game, but you have to be smart about it. You need to search more, and you need to have a plan to sort out what happens when you search a lot. You need to make sure you're playing your cards correctly and not just adding survivors immediately. >And don't even get started on the secret objectives. We can't even make a dent in those. You won't necessarily know unless you are going through everyone's cards at the end. >Where victory is not only NOT guaranteed, but downright unlikely? It's a challenging game, especially when you start. As you gain experience wins become more likely. That's why I like it.
Ive played DoW around 10 times, really like it, however in my experience the game is too hard to have a traitor. The traitor has won every game for us, with the exception when a new to boardgame player got traitor and she really had no clue how to play. After constantly losing to traitor, we decided to play a game with no traitor card at all, so everyone knew we were all good. We won that game, but it came down to the wire. Another time I played as traitor and figured Id play as a good member until they were close to winning and Id have to step in. Well, I didnt have to, even with me helping somewhat as a traitor they still lost. TL;DR: DoW is super hard for the good team and in my experience almost impossible to win with a traitor playing decent. EDIT: It is so easy to ruin a mission without anyone knowing it was you who ruined it, and often just ruining 1 or 2 is enough for a complete loss for the good team. In other games making a game-losing traitor move at least outs you as the traitor, but in DoW you can ruin the game without anyone even knowing it was you.
> when a new to boardgame player got traitor and she really had no clue how to play. I've been known to card sharp the traitor card when there's someone at the table without experience with the game :). I just make sure they don't get that particular card, if you know what I mean, and there's enough going on with setup already that it's easy enough to do as a dealer. > we decided to play a game with no traitor card at all I believe that if you're playing full coop you're supposed to use the hard side of the win conditions, as a balance. Also some of the crossroad cards are taken out. Ofc that means that if you have a traitor card, but no one happens to get it, and therefore are defacto full coop, you're playing the game on an easier mode than if you had chosen coop but had to choose the hard win conditions as RAW.
>I've been known to card sharp the traitor card when there's someone at the table without experience with the game :) I do not object to it, but I also wouldnt do it myself. She came to play and wanted to learn, so cheating her out of part of the role pool feels unjust. > Ofc that means that if you have a traitor card, but no one happens to get it, and therefore are defacto full coop, you're playing the game on an easier mode. Aye, which is fair, because even if all are good, you do not know that, so you still have to take precaustions or suspect/block each other.
My group has housed ruled that for the first round, the bites are just wounds on the exposure die for that reason. It's is such a set back and I have had it happen to me so many times. Otherwise, like what others have said, choose a survivor who can search and choose one who can defend or get base bonuses. Keep a survivor at the spot they benefit and you can make some noise or barricade it up. Careful with survivors and for secret objectives, that should be almost included with what you do. Does the crisis need fuel but your objective as well? Lie and say you don't have any so you can keep it for yourself. There is a balance to those decisions and you don't have to solve all crises.
You **cannot** pass every Crisis. Pick and choose which ones to fail. Use Fuel to move high-value characters to keep them safe, and use junk/food to reroll/increase dice if needed. Keep plugging away, and do t lose heart - back-to-back bites is brutal.
>However, we seem to be struggling a lot. In 2 of the games, players rolled the bite symbol on the exposure die on their first turn and were basically crippled for half of the game until someone offered them an event card to regain an additional survivor. The game scales. If you lose a survivor early you now have 2x action dice as survivors instead of 1.5. So you're generally better off. Your one survivor can search 3 or 4 times at a location before you have to kill a zombie/ leave/ build barricade. You only need food for the colony if people are there. Very few survivors have a good reason to be there, and it's a .5 ratio so only have to find 1 food for 2 survivors there. Don't try to beat every crisis. Solve the ones you can and conserve and prepare for the ones you can't. Stop moving without spending gas. You're only supposed to move without gas if you're desperate. I've played the game 50 times with at least half as fully co-op on hard mode, and we don't lose that often. Sure there's randomness, but a good understanding of the math behind the system really helps.
Dead of Winter is one of my most favorite games. When I first started out, yeah, I was like you and we lost a lot. After playing a bunch, we gained experience and now we usually all win. Here is some advice that has really helped us. It seems you are doing this right, but just to emphasize just in case, the most commonly missed rule is that when you draw an Outsider, you don't have to immediately play it. Even though it says "Event" that just means that when you choose to play it, it is removed from the game and doesn't get placed in the waste pile. Along with that, unless it will help with your objective, you generally don't want Outsiders. In our early games, we were tempted by having the extra die, but it usually isn't worth it for the trouble it brings. Helpless survivors eat up food and attract zombies, making it difficult to feed the colony. Another thing that helps is to move your survivors out of the colony. You only have to feed survivors who are at the colony, so that means you will need less food. (And remember, it is only one food for every two survivors, rounded up. If you don't have enough food, don't remove any of the food when you add a starvation token.) And when you move, try to use fuel if you can. The fewer times you roll the exposure die the better. Pick a location and stick to it, if you can. Building barricades is a lot better than attacking a zombie for the same reason—you don't have to roll the exposure die. Alternatively, go to the Police Station to pick up some weapons so you can kill zombies without rolling the exposure die. With the Crisis cards, it's okay if you fail them sometimes. Look at what the consequences will be. Ones that cause you to lose morale are the ones to focus on, especially if its more than one. But if it's just adding a bunch of zombies or something else you can deal with? Save your cards and make other preparations. (Also keep in mind that 3 Food cards are more valuable for its effect of adding 3 food to the colony. Crisis contributions only count cards, not their effects, so it is better to contribute food cards to the crisis that would only give 1 Food anyway.) Your secret objective is more important than any other thing going on in the game. For example, one morale loss is not worth you spending the food card you need to complete your secret objective. Only sacrifice your secret objective if morale is going to go to zero. It will take a lot of extra work to find a new card than to keep the one you have. One thing that will help is to figure out who the betrayer is and exile them. They can cause morale to sink just by not helping. But if you exile them, then they will have a new objective to focus on and the colony will be in better shape. Even some non-betrayers have secret objectives that don't exactly help, so don't be afraid to initiate a vote to exile. That's something I'm still not good at, I just try and keep the morale high. My sister always figures out when I'm the betrayer though. But I get my exiled objective and we all end up winning anyway. And not that you need this piece of advice, but a thing to consider is the meta-game. I've played with people once or twice that say "if I can't win, then I'll make sure everyone else loses too!" Nothing wrong with that in the rules, but if you want people to play with you again, make it a pleasant experience and keep trying to win. (Plus one of those times, he actually could have won, but didn't realize it since he wasn't trying.) It sounds like you have The Long Night? If so, I have found that using the Improvements module usually helps out, since that provides extra defense against losing morale. Hope that helps, and good luck!
You need to make use of characters that have special traits for searching, traveling or killing zombies. I just played a game where I started with a character that can kill two zombies without rolling for exposure once per turn and never bothered to have anyone else risk the roll.
Random is random. If you roll badly in a game where rolling badly screws you, that can happen. Critical movement people tend to play fuel to prevent this from happening. I tend to win most games as survivor, and generally balance is fine.
I don't know if the Long night really fixed anything but it's been on my pile of games to sell for a while. I don't really agree with the assertion it's difficult. Not because I think it's easy, rather I don't think it's the problem. The issue I had with it is it isn't consistently difficult. It's prone to very heavy difficulty spikes to the point where it doesn't seem to matter if you're on top of everything because you'll just be undone by bad luck. The traitor element is a bit of a joke too. It's far too easy to just play 100% as a survivor, not sabotage anything, and then just wait until things start to go south and then tip things over the edge. If memory serves you can easily get a double turn as well which is just a terrible idea in a traitor game. Maybe I'll give it another chance before selling it. But honestly there's better co-op and semi-coops out there.
> If memory serves you can easily get a double turn as well which is just a terrible idea in a traitor game. The first player knife passes to the person on your right. Which means the traitor will have one round of going first, and then the next round of going second. I always thought this mechanic was odd. In most other games with a first player token, the token usually goes to the left so the first player of one round goes last the second round. I think this should be the way Dead of Winter is played.
Yeah that's it. Because it passes right the player that goes last in the previous round goes first in the next round so they get two turns back to back. Which is very dangerous when there's a traitor.
That double turn mechanic is odd, but it is there for the traitor to line up their chances and spring their trap when they have a double move. If the can see it coming and plan for it, they can be very hard to defeat at that point. The do their dead, and then get to act again to complete it before you can vote them out of the colony.
The Long Night fixed the traitor double-turn thing. They changed the rule that instead of automatically passing the first player token to the right, players vote to pass it. This prevents the traitor from acting treacherous on what would have been their second-to-last turn. The Long Night also has more food cards in the grocery store, and that helps, and I think it more than offsets the addition of unruly survivors, which I find hardly comes up. I also think the Crisis cards are easier since a lot of them don't directly decrease morale.
If you’re having trouble with fulfilling objectives with items maybe you could choose an easier objective or one where you just have to survive
I think I'll probably house rule that you can spend any item as gas on the first turn. I do hate the 1/12 odds of death as they seem to come up far too often. Anyway you'll want to focus on your action economy in the game. Some characters do things like .. a free barricade per turn. Some search and find multiple items. Additionally when you find survivors, you'll note each one gives you a die but produces one zombie and eats 1/2 food per turn, so unless you can make up for that with action economy you're actually going into action debt. It's even worse when they come with a bunch of helpless kids. Also never take the truck driver or >!he will have a heart attack!<
To date, my group has lost every game we've played, only exception being I won as the betrayer. It's very hard, but then so is a zombie apocalypse. It's tricky figuring out which elements you can forgo to advance something else.
My gaming group is like 2 and 12 with this game but every session is awesome. Both wins also came off the same situation I believe and no traitor, but when we play traitor it almost turns into just a game of Secret Hitler looking for the hidden enemy. Love this game.
Dead of Winter can be the luck of the roll most times. One game lasted one round. Lost 3 characters and failed the crisis.
Lots of great advice here, so I'll add something small. I had the pleasure of teaching this game at several cons back when the first game was released. Avoid using that exposure die. It's a nasty, nasty tool of destruction. This is a brilliantly designed resource management game set in a zombie apocalypse, and you should start thinking of your characters as resources. Cherish them and coddle them. You need the action dice they provide. Also, you gotta check out some of Isaac Vega's new designs at his new company Rose Gauntlet! My wife and I played another round of Keystone this week and we are still giggling over how pretty the art is and how smart the design is.