Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsIf you like any of these (Epidemic, Shadows over Camelot, Resistance, and Arkham Horror) you'll probably like this game.
Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2015
Having played 2 games of this, in general, our group liked the game, but the time inbetween turns is a bit longer than most would like. Later in the game when a player has 3 or 4 survivors to control it tends to take longer for that player than others. There are several actions that can be taken for each survivor, which allows more choices on each turn, but more choices adds to the length of the game, and downtime when it isn't your turn.
In each game we played there wasn't a betrayer, so I can't speak to that aspect yet. Having that aspect should make the game more challenging, however, it wasn't too difficult to meet the crisis and the main objectives we chose for the first two games we played. The first game was the recommended "we need more samples" and the second one was one where we needed 2 medicine per player, but the medicine couldn't be from our starter items. We passed each of these in 4 or 5 rounds. Each would have been more challenging if there was a betrayer in the group. I would strongly recommend changing the rules to force someone to be a betrayer (shuffle as many secret mission cards as players, keeping one betrayer card in) if you want to make the game challenging.
The instruction manual and player turn cards are very informative and you can tell a lot of attention was paid to the design and presentation of the components and rules of this game to make things easier to understand, and give the players less to remember. I wish the designers would've printed the Colony Phase order on the board to show the order in which to resolve the Colony phase, but that's my only beef with the overall presentation of this game.
This is a game with a pretty heavy theme. Crossworld stories, zombies, getting bit, survivors dying, feeding the colony, attending to the crisis, searching through piles of items and making noise, attracting zombies, finding new survivors, all add to the sense of being a part of a zombie apocalypse. You'll want to make sure background distractions don't take you away from the mood and sense of urgency of the game. If you play with a group who isn't into a heavy theme it may not appeal as well. We have a few who didn't like to read the stories on the crossword cards, so if you play with those types it may not be as fun of an experience.
Overall, if you want an extremely accessible game that appeals to everyone and can be played in 30 minutes with little setup time buy King of Tokyo. If you want something a little,deeper, with more strategy, backstabbing, theme, and a longer playing experience Dead of Winter is a good game, and I personally prefer it over all other cooperative games that I've played...Epidemic, Arkham Horror, Shadows over Camelot, Resistance. In some sense this has elements of all of those games, and if you like any of them, you'll probably enjoy Dead of Winter.