Plaid Hat Games Dead of Winter The Long Night Board Game Expansion - Post-Apocalyptic Survival Game, Strategy Game for Kids & Adults, Ages 13+, 2-5 Players, 1-2 Hour Playtime, Made

This is a stand-alone expansion of the original Dead of Winter that adds additional complications and nemeses - a mutant laboratory and marauding raiders, and more opportunities for evildoing for exiled players. The stand alone could be played as the original, with new characters, crossroads, objectives, and crises It adds a few adult crossroads, packaged in plain brown paper envelope with warning label, which are quite fun & surprising but, yes, adult. Or you can play with the expansion locations and complications. So far, these extras are fun and seem to fit comfortably within the usual game-play time-frame without slowing things down. DoW is one of my favorite games so who needs extras when you are already overrun by zombies? But what's not to love with adding mutants and criminality? I recommend it with one caveat for other DOW veterans- You'll miss Sparky.

What a great game.Basically, Dead of winter is a mostly co-operative resource management game and a race against the clock. This is probably our favorite zombie game, definitely easier on the wallet than going 900 bucks into zombicide.Zombies are treated as a resource that needs to be managed, along with food, tools, weapons, helpless and useless mouths to feed, books, and medicine. The game is divided into 2 phases: each players independent turn, and the groups team phase. Every team phase will introduce a new "challenge," which is just a resource that must be gathered, and donated to the group pile, before all the players' individual turns are over. The group will have a main game goal, which everyone generally tries to accomplish, such as: kill so many zombies, keep people from starving for so long, save so many other survivors. On top of this main goal, each individual player has their own goal to accomplish, and some of them run counter to the main groups goal, a few of them are "betrayal" goals, which usually spell disaster for the main group. In order to win, players must defeat the board's countdown, manage group resources to accomplish the group's goals and challenges, and accomplish their own individual goal.The long night introduces a few new elements, which are mostly beneficial for the players: improvements for the base, additional areas to search, additional items for each area, and 20ish new survivors. On top of these new elements, the generic items have been updated to include additional abilities, and some tokens had reverse sides which turn barricades into explosive traps or useless survivors into unruly survivors for example.We play the snot out of this game. most scenarios generally take us 2ish hours to play through, setup takes 10-15 minutes. expect a little longer for your initial runthrough of the game.Couple great elements of this game :a zombie bite = a dead character and the chance to spread the bite. This is great, definitely adds to the survival horror feel, we appreciate this mechanic than those in games like zombicide or last night on earth, where you take multiple zombie bites to kill off a character.Crossroads cards add a semi roleplaying / storytelling element to the game. each individual player turn someone will draw a card, and check to see if it's circumstances are met. If they have been met, a story gets read, and usually the player who's turn it is usually gets to choose an option, sometimes good, sometimes simply less bad.The game manuals are very clearly written, and include a campaign types playthrough option, which is designed to introduce the newer elements to the expansion gradually (in the long night) or increase difficulty gradually and tell a story in the original game.Some things to keep in mind. Long Night is not required to play the core game. The core game gets mostly replaced with the Long Night. If you have to choose between one or the other, I would grab the Long Night first, as it includes more than the original. The original survivors are still very playable in the expansion, as are all of the other cards. you can include 18 or 19 of the survivors from the expansion to the original without any trouble, the other two require elements from the Long Night to take advantage their abilities. Also, don't ebay the special release characters for $20 each, Plaid Hat lists them on their website at a reasonable price. One more thing the Expansion has over the original, the cardstock / paper stock cutouts for the areas you explore during the game have been replaced with high quality, thick, game board material. Plaid Hat, you guys hit the ball outa the park on this one. I laminated my old ones, and I'll probably do it with the new thick cutouts, but It's definitely not necessary.Dead of winter has replaced Last Night on Earth as our default Zombie game, and the game play is different enough that we still play Last Night on Earth also.

Dead of Winter: The Long Night is an excellent game. Thematically this game really capture the tension and uneasiness of not trusting your fellow survivors just like the original Dead of Winter did. If you have played the original, you'll be familiar with this game, as it takes what works about the original game and improves little areas and adds a few new mechanics.The game comes with all new survivors, crossroads cards, and standees for both the survivors and zombies along with some new cards in the various decks. The new characters all feel fresh and many of them get to use some of the new mechanics, such as laying mines that blow up and kill zombies instead of just regular barricades. There are several optional modules that you can add in, such as base improvements, a band of scavengers that can attack you, and a research facility with special infected that are more dangerous and deadly than the normal zombie but that also offers many powerful items. There are missions that incorporate these new mechanics into them as well.Overall, the quality of this game and the pieces is great! If you have never played Dead of Winter before, this is definitely the copy to get. If you have the original and are wanting to add some more variety and also improve some of the components from the base game, it is worth it to get this game. I've heard there is another expansion that's coming that will allow you to play as two warring colonies if you have both sets, so it could be worth having both!

My boardgame group and I love this game. They amount of different actions and crossroad cards create fun and unique experiences each time you play. Out of the 3 modules, I enjoyed the improvements and Raxxon zombies. I did not care for the bandits, but it makes being exiled more fun.There are some silly crossroads cards ( cards that trigger, i.e. occur, if the current player does a certain action. ) Sometimes these will be "If so and so is at gas station and such and such character is in play." Other times they will be "If player scratches their head," or "Someone is accused of being a traitor."I seriously recommend this to people that enjoy long board games with traitors, high risk of dying on the last turn, and long set up. And boy do I mean long set up. It takes 30 minutes to set up every game it feels like, and even longer to put it all back in the box. That is the con to have so many board pieces, figurines, and cards. Its definitely worth it though, in my opinion.Also of note, there are several "Adult oriented" cards that deal with suicide and other adult themes, but these are separated from the main cards so you do not have to play with them if you're playing with kids.