Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game - Tips & Strategies

A tip I saw online, that we quickly implemented, is to give each player a different color of the little rubber bands that come with the rubber band looms popular for children these days. As each player adds characters to their group, they slip a rubber band of their color onto the base of the standees they are playing. This makes it possible to quickly tell which standees are yours and where they are at on the game board as play progresses. The rubber bands are cheap, and one package of mixed colors should last quite a while! We have found them in the craft supplies, toy sections and hair departments in various big box stores.

Try to reduce exposure. Of course you’ll need to move and slay zombies, but find ways to minimize those actions (without losing your focus on the objective – ain’t supposed to be a cakewalk). For example, keep an adept fighter in the colony and a skilled searcher on a non-colony location. And use your character traits!

During set-up each player is dealt 4 survivor cards and chooses 2 survivors to play. Always pick the survivors which grant an extra card drawn during searches. These survivors will help you find other survivors much quicker, granting you more dice and thusly granting you more actions. Make sure you keep these survivors at places they can search too!

I have seen discussions of this variant on reddit and boardgamegeek so I don’t know who came up with it, but it makes a 2 player game very good. Below is the setup as stated on this thread.

Follow the typical setup for 2 players in the rule book, except for the following:
– Deal each player 1 non-betrayal, and 1 betrayal secret objective.
– The “Exile a player” action is not available.

The three ways the game can end are:
1) Both players have achieved the main objective, and their non-betrayer secret objective. In this case, they both win.
2) Morale is at 0, and one player has completed his Betrayer secret objective. In this case, the single betrayer wins.
3) Morale is at 0, and both players have completed their Betrayer secret objective. In this case, both players lose.

Go fetch this from the cop shop, arm a colony survivor with it, and have that survivor keep the zombie hoard at bay.

What some people don’t like is the ‘double turn’, in which a betrayer can reveal himself in his last turn on one round, and then become the first player in the next round (causing a lot of damage in 2 turns without any possibility to stop it). To fix this, you can use my House Rule so that players can vote to exile someone at the end of someone’s turn, even if its not their own turn. I think this is a nice compromise. A betrayer can still cause a lot of damage in one turn or play more cautious, while the other players are able to stop him before getting his second turn. This also makes sense thematically. Since this is a House Rule, be sure that everyone you play with agrees upon it.

This is part tip, part strategy. Dead of Winter, in my experience, is a game where there is usually a fair bit of table talk and discussion. Whether your group talks strategy, or whether they like to get right into it and actually role-play their part in the colony during conversations, communication is a valuable asset in this game. There are two reasons for this:

1) The obvious advantage is that the group (assuming no one is a traitor) will be most effective if everyone coordinates their efforts a bit. Also, some wheeling and dealing can help with the completion of secret goals.

2) The other advantage to paying attention to the conversation at the table is when there is a betrayer in the mix. If you think someone might be the betrayer, you might catch them by keeping the conversation going. Since the betrayer will probably have to lie to keep up appearances, being mindful of what has been said (and of body language, if you have an eye for that sort of thing) might let you catch some minor slip. And if [i]you[/i] are the Betrayer, then conversation can help you keep suspicions low, or redirect them.

Keep everybody talking–it’s more fun, more sociable, and you never know what you can learn from a little slip of the tongue.

Then keep track of the number of cards in player hands as well as how much everyone is helping to fight crisis.

My experience is that betrayers will often search but they will not help with a whole lot to defeat crisis resulting in a large hand size. So if anyone is trying to conceal their cards is an indication they could be a betrayer.

Instead of a player controlling two characters, a two-player team working together decide what their controlled people do and each act out the various roles as people are used and decisions are made. The team of two people share the cards and such, but when it comes to rolling and moving, each player moves his own people giving them limited autonomy within the pair of players.