Rocky Played Dead of Winter
I live in Ohio and the irony of playing this game last week when our game day was almost cancelled due to a sleet storm has not been lost on me. Despite the abysmal weather I absolutely fell in love with this game. Very few board games have instilled so much emotion into me. The creator has said that most of the concepts in the game aren’t original but they are tweaked to do them well. I agree this game has some polished mechanics and I thought the mechanics interactions made the various emotions come to the forefront and made for a very pleasurable experience despite the dark and gritty survival theme.
Overall the game has a strong theme and combines several different ideas and mechanics into a strong package. The zombies almost take a backdrop to the feeling of survival in the colony. There are 10 different Main Objective cards included and each one can be turned over for a tougher experience. These objectives bring some great variety and a little bit of a story to your experience. They include things like; Gathering dead zombies to try to find a cure, clearing out at least two locations of all of their items and building barricades around the colony and the town to fortify your position. What I really love about these objectives is that they can be done multiple times and still not get old. The reason they don’t get old is because everyone has a Secret Objective as well that requires the main objective to be completed as well as something else. Sometimes your secret objective coincides with the main objective and sometimes it will make you look like a betrayer and get you voted out of the colony. Don’t worry though, if you get exiled out of the colony you get one of 10 Exiled Objectives. There are 24 secret objectives but the game designers thought it would be great to add some paranoia to the mix so there is also 10 Betrayal Objectives. At the start of the game you take two secret objectives per player (the rules suggest only one per player if you want to increase the likelihood of a betrayer) and only one random betrayal objective and mix them all together before dealing each person their own objective. This is one of the cool mechanics that will bring a lot of emotions when you’re playing. There are times when you feel like everyone is a betrayer (even though there is only ever one) and yet you have to work with these other survivors to try to face various Crisis, which happen once per round (a round is one turn per player and then a single colony turn).
The main objective will tell you how many rounds you have and so with only 20 crisis cards possible, the more you play the game the more you will have repeats. This doesn’t matter because each time you play you will most likely have a different main objective as well as a different secret objective and crossroads (keep reading). Every round you have to contribute food to the people at the colony but the way you contribute to the crisis is much different. Players can secretly put items they find or started with towards the objective. Those items are placed face down and after all the players have acted (and therefore had a chance to contribute or sabatoge) there is a step during the colony phase where all the items are shuffled (so you don’t know who contributed what) and then turned over to see if the colony managed to beat the crisis and if not then they have to fulfil the fail conditions, which normally involves wounds, starvation or more zombies. Contributing to the crisis feels like a mini game of Resistance that fits really well into the theme.
Every player’s turn the person to the right of that player draws a Crossroads Card and reads only the first line to see what event has to happen to trigger the Crossroad. A common trigger would be if the current player has a non-exiled character at the colony. Some triggers are obscure but when they happen they really are neat little events that strengthen the story, theme and replayability. One obscure trigger that happened in our game was if the active player had their character move from the colony to any location and the character, Sophie, wasn’t currently in play. Sophie is a pilot so after being treated with a little story snippet of how Sophie’s helicopter crashed then the active player was given the choice to save Sophie (add her to their survivors) and a helpless survivor or let both die and loot the helicopter while she yelled at you trapped in the pilot’s seat for getting an item. It really added a dark and gritty story element to the game and surprisingly enough there was some roleplaying as well because there were times where people didn’t want to do something just because they didn’t feel their character would do something so heinous. Some crossroads involve a vote and others, like this one with Sophie, only the active player gets to decide. There are 80 crossroads cards in the game and this is where the subtitle: A Crossroads Game comes from.
. If you want to learn how to play with a video click here for the Watch it Played How To Video and if you want to see them play the game click here for the first episode.
The game is very popular and for good reason. Right now it is sold out at my local store and on the Plaid Hat Games website but if you pick it up through Amazon, please use our Amazon link here to help support the podcast. This is a game that won’t just sit on your shelf for years to come, this is a game that has not only earned a place on that shelf but will come down frequently on game nights when you have 2-5 players and a couple of hours to kill. Enjoy!
Twitter: @LaffinJoker
