Dead of Winter: The Long Night
They finally started shipping the standalone expansion to normal civilians. It’s really good.
TLN is a complete game, and you can combine it with the original DOW as you wish. The instructions for this are pretty wishy washy, along the lines of “combining decks may produce unexpected results.” Oh you don’t say.
TLN adds three new twists to the game, and we used them all last night. The first and simplest is Improvements: little mods you make to the survivors’ colony. I was worried that the work to build them would be too costly in the face of harsh scenario deadlines, but it turns out to not be the case.
The second module is the Bandits, a new location and a batch of standees that start taking up space at the other locations (screwing up your own scavenging and attracting way way more zombies). Mostly they just clutter up the map. Not persuaded they’re a great addition but we’ll try them again.
The third module is the Zaxxor (?) Pharmaceuticals thing. Another new location, but this one regularly spits out special freaky zombies mostly stolen from Left 4 Dead. It’s neat! The lab scavenging deck is full of super weird tech, and the special zombies are challenging. Will keep.
The rest of the box is new everything: New crossroads, new characters, new equipment, new objectives and so on. I do think it’ll combine with the original really well eventually, but for now I’m just playing TLN by itself.
Thanks for the write up. Is the game about the same length as DoW or do you think it’s about the same? (with experience)
I really like DoW. It doesn’t come out very often in my group though; the difficulty variability from game to game, a relative lack of control & the game length are factors. Does this address any of those or is it still more ride/experience than strategy game?
The Zaxxor sounds great.
Matthew Gagan it’s got all the same strengths and weaknesses as the original. It is literally the same game, with new options (that don’t make the game longer, just harder).
I forgot, there are some tiny form factor improvements! One is the noise counters. Iirc in the original, you rolled a die for every noise to test, right? Now they’re two-sided tokens, and you just flip them like coins.
I’ve heard really good things about this game. It’s 50% off at Tradesmart (closing, sadly). Is this worth it to pick up for a guy who is a tacit board game player?
Nicholas Hopkins the original and this version are both really good. You can dial the co-op up and down (there’s a maybe-betray element to the game), and is very much in the experience-not-strategy vein. I think it’s a really solid choice, especially for folks who aren’t into hard-edged competition, or who like a break from it (like us).