LogFAQs > #932174547

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Topic	another year of tabletop rankings and writeups
SeabassDebeste 12/28/19 8:35:25 PM #31:	129. Dead of Winter (2014) Category: One vs Many Genres: Ameritrash, pickup-and-deliver, hidden roles Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4 Game length: 60-120 minutes Experience: 3-4 games over 2 sessions (2016-2017) with 5 players Previous ranks: NR (2016), 76/80 (2018) Summary - Everyone is working together to achieve personal secret missions in a zombie apocalypse. But one of those hidden objectives may be a traitorous one that involves screwing everyone else over! Throughout the game you visit different locations (and thus risk exposure to zombies), affect the morale of the survivors' colony, recruit new survivors (via "crossroads cards"), and collect/search for items. Design - Dead of Winter has some really cool ideas. The post-apocalyptic setting, the one guy secretly trying to tank you, the crossroads cards, people needing to cooperate but also accomplish their own goals, the atmosphere of betrayal... the problem is, I have yet (and to be fair, I've only played twice) to find it come together right. Most of the mechanics just don't feel very good. There are a lot of rules and a lot of moving pieces and things to track, but as far as I've seen, you mostly just spend time rolling annoying dice, making trivial decisions, and digging through decks, fairly isolated of other players. The game provides a nominal resistance, but it's enough that a win from the traitor can feel very much like "oh, okay, that happened" instead of actually feeling like they... well, did anything. Experience - Love playing a lot of euro-type games with my group, but thematic or roleplay or hidden role stuff doesn't take well with the people I played with, and that probably is the big difference here. That said, all the design choices I mentioned still hold. It just doesn't feel very good. Future - Maybe certain scenarios are better, and the ideal, thematically immersed, whatever group will come along. But I think that while DoW was a hot topic in '15 and '16, time has kind of passed it by at this point. --- yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness <cite>SeabassDebeste posted [p:932174547] in another ye... [t:78284791]...</cite> <quote>129. Dead of Winter (2014) Category: One vs Many Genres: Ameritrash, pickup-and-deliver, hidden roles Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4 Game length: 60-120 minutes Experience: 3-4 games over 2 sessions (2016-2017) with 5 players Previous ranks: NR (2016), 76/80 (2018) Summary - Everyone is working together to achieve personal secret missions in a zombie apocalypse. But one of those hidden objectives may be a traitorous one that involves screwing everyone else over! Throughout the game you visit different locations (and thus risk exposure to zombies), affect the morale of the survivors' colony, recruit new survivors (via "crossroads cards"), and collect/search for items. Design - Dead of Winter has some really cool ideas. The post-apocalyptic setting, the one guy secretly trying to tank you, the crossroads cards, people needing to cooperate but also accomplish their own goals, the atmosphere of betrayal... the problem is, I have yet (and to be fair, I've only played twice) to find it come together right. Most of the mechanics just don't feel very good. There are a lot of rules and a lot of moving pieces and things to track, but as far as I've seen, you mostly just spend time rolling annoying dice, making trivial decisions, and digging through decks, fairly isolated of other players. The game provides a nominal resistance, but it's enough that a win from the traitor can feel very much like "oh, okay, that happened" instead of actually feeling like they... well, did anything. Experience - Love playing a lot of euro-type games with my group, but thematic or roleplay or hidden role stuff doesn't take well with the people I played with, and that probably is the big difference here. That said, all the design choices I mentioned still hold. It just doesn't feel very good. Future - Maybe certain scenarios are better, and the ideal, thematically immersed, whatever group will come along. But I think that while DoW was a hot topic in '15 and '16, time has kind of passed it by at this point. --- yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness</quote> ... Copied to Clipboard!
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