Dead of Winter

By Charles Etheridge-Nunn

Dead of Winter is a zombie game, kind of. There's thankfully a lot more to it, enough to distinguish it from Zombies!!!, Last Night on Earth, Zombie Fluxx, Zombie Dice, Zombie Munchkin, Zombicide and so on. 

The biggest problem with Dead of Winter is that it was open to preorder months and months ago, it was due to be released shortly after. After hearing Shut Up & Sit Down talk about the game I felt it captured exactly what I wanted to see in a piece of zombie fiction and in the horrors of a semi-cooperative game.

That's the great thing about Dead of Winter, it's cooperative until it isn't. You're all good people working for the good of the community, but you all have your own motivations which you have to pursue for your own survival. In the game you'll be having to weigh up whether you should survive at the cost of everyone else, or if you can help others to live just to get anyone through to the end of winter.

So the good news is that after considerable delays, it's finally here!

So let's have a look inside the box and see what this game is all about.




The box is considerably heavier than it looks like it should be, a good sign for the amount of content jam-packed into it. The preorder even came with a promotional extra character of Kodiak Colby, based on the producer of the game, Colby Dauch.

This is the box sans shrink wrap. You can't really see it well in the photo, but the cover actually has a slight variation in texture. There have been a lot of production values put into it. Definitely not something to sniff at.
Dead of Winter wasn't handled like a Kickstarter game but the preorder system did feel a little like it and as much as I've enjoyed some of my Kickstarter-backed games, they're not always of the best quality.

So let's look inside the box...

...

Oh.

Um.

I'm not going to lie, I'm pretty disappointed with this.

I think something's gone wrong with this delivery. I wondered why the postman kept insisting that instead of signing for the box I pick a black or white stone. Maybe I should have picked the white one. I don't know. The Kodiak Colby promo now looks like me but isn't showing up on cameras. 

I can hear rain coming from my flatmate's room, heavy rain. And some kind of mechanical whooping. I think I'm going to have to email Plaid Hat Games and see if I can get this whole thing cleared up.

Don't worry, I WILL review Dead of Winter.
I will review Lost.
I WILL review Lost.
What?
I didn't even type that. I know this is a new computer I'm typing on, but there's not predictive text or anything, why is it saying these things?
I need to find out what's wrong. I need to go back to the island. I need to what? No. No, I need to