DE(AD)CEMBER WEEK # 3

What's occurrin'.

The wonderful Mrs. K has made me pack away all my modelling stuff until after the Winter Solstice festivities have finished, so unfortunately I have no painted zombies to show you. Luckily I do have a couple of photo's of some gaming the WNI has been upto. I'm sure your all glad of the rest from the zombies anyway.

More culture to show, another magnificent zombie santa by savage zombie. I really like this dude's style, they are incredibly detailed. The lighting effect, I find superb.Beautiful work! This delightfully festive piece is called Merry Xmas 2011. Enjoy!

MERRY XMAS 2011.

These shots were taken a couple of weeks ago at our usual WNI (Wednesday Night Irregulars) gathering. It's about the fourth time we've played Dead of Winter and we still haven't won a game yet. I think it's because so far we've tried to play it like Zombicide, where killing zombies is the order of the day. Hence the name.

Dead of Winter is much more about resource gathering and management, rather than fighting. One of the main reasons is that it's so easy to die. Every time you travel to a location or fight a zed, you have to roll the exposure dice. With varying results like dead, frostbitten or just bitten, I'm sure there's blank spaces on it too, I just didn't roll any.

A COUPLE OF TURNS IN. MY ARMS AT THE TOP.

At the bottom of the above photo you can see a knife shaped counter, that's the first player token. The large square in the middle is the colony, where your band of survivors start and have to defend from the zombie menace. You'll also notice cards surrounding this with piles of black cards on them. The black cards are the results of your searching, mainly resources but there's also a few surprises including more survivors to join your merry band. They are stacked in the different locations that you have to travel to.

Not only are you battling zombies but you are also combating the cold and potential starvation. Every survivor has to be fed as do a few hapless survivors, who are not characters like the survivors you can play as. This is one of the main objectives, just finding enough food to last from turn to turn. On top of this every turn has it's own crisis, a new crisis card is turned over every turn, solved by gathering certain resources like food, medicine or fuel amongst other things.

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE ZOMBIES. WE'D ALL GONE FOR A SMOKE BREAK.

The main objective was revealed at the beginning of the game by drawing a card from the scenario deck. This tells you how many turns the colony has to survive for and any other requirements to be met. Another way to lose is have morale hit zero. Your starting morale is also on the scenario card. Morale is affected, usually negatively by things like not completing your crisis needs, not having enough food and people dying.

The zombies also turn up with alarming regularity mind. Every turn zombies appear at the colony, equal to the number of people in the colony including hapless survivors. They also show up at the various locations where survivors are, again equal to the number of survivors, but there's also a chance the noise you made searching has attracted more. A four plus on a d6 results in a zombie appearing.

SHELDON PUTTING ZOMBIES ONTO A LOCATION.

There's also a waste management issue to resolve. Every resource you use to fulfill crises and food issues are put into the trash pile at the end of the turn. If there are ten waste cards in the trash pile at the end phase of the turn you lose one morale. Not good.

Another mechanic in play are the "crossroads" moments. Some of you may have noticed the yellow cards with the black arrows on the back of them. These are the crossroad cards. They represent chances that can change the course of the game, not always good. A crossroads card is given to the player who went first the previous turn or to the first player's right at the start, the first player token is passed to the left at the start of a new turn.

ANOTHER VIEW OF THE BOARD A FEW TURNS LATER.

The crossroad cards can only be played if certain conditions are met, like going to a particular location or by moving the character mentioned on the crossroads card. When they are played the shit can really hit the fan, a good example of one outcome is a mother seeing her zombiefied kids resulting in her burning down the school with her and her kids inside. Oh, happy days!

Everyone starts with two survivors. You roll a number of dice equal to your survivors plus one. These are your action dice and the results let you pay for searching and fighting plus a few other things. So you don't have unlimited actions to resolve everything. Also your survivors can die on one roll of the exposure dice, as happened to me, twice in the first two turns. Awesome!

AN OVERHEAD VIEW OF THE ACTION.

As you can see there are a lot of ways to lose Dead of Winter. We were doing really well on this particular evening, having survived three turns with only two more to endure for the win. When my clumsy ass knocked over an almost full cup of coffee. The resulting coffee tsunami flooded the playing area, taking us the rest of the evening to clean up and try and rescue Sheldon's Dead of Winter. Awkward! We haven't seen Sheldon since.

I'd just like to thank The Tollman for taking the pictures! And take this opportunity to wish all my viewers, followers and commentors a Happy Christmas. That's it for this time dudes and dudettes. So until next time try and be more like the DUDE and "take it easy".