Dead of Winter - 11 May 2016

With just two this week, a chance for the first play of David's game Dead of Winter.  Another zombies game, but unlike Kieron's favourite where you play just a single character, each player has a group of survivors to control.  The survivors have different strengths and abilities, and additional characters are discovered during the game - which gives you more dice / actions.

The board has a survivors hide-out which you can barricade as it is attacked by zombies, plus half a dozen locations where a stack of cards represents items you can search for e.g. medicine, food, additional survivors.

Each game has a mission card with victory conditions to achieve.  Our first game was to defeat a certain number of zombies within a certain number of turns (achieved).  The second was to completely search (i.e. take all the cards) from two different locations (also achieved... just).

The game is cooperative but with more players, each has a specific additional victory condition - so although you are still trying to meet the mission victory conditions and survive, there is still a way to have a bit of competition, but not in a full-blown Battlestar Galactica deceive-your-friends kind of way (so Andy will be content).

The rules were pretty straightforward but took a while to go through, suggest we just get cracking next time.  It certainly looked the part - printed pictures of the zombies and all the different characters, rather than coloured plastic like in Zombies.

It was a lot of fun - look forward to playing it with more players.

Battlestar Galactica, 11 May

Another outing for Commander Adama and crew with a six player Galactica round at Adrian's last week. We opted for one of the game variants that changed the initial character set up (seemingly simply to remove the better looking cast member cards...).

The game was a textbook example of cohesion and co-operation from the start, so much so that Kieron was convinced that everyone was human and that there were no Cylons. Not true, Adrian was a Cylon from the start and James found that out in about turn 2 but kept quiet lest he draw the Cylon card in turn 4. As it turned out Andy did, but played it very low key. Adrian did too, but largely because he couldn't remember whether it was worth the Cylons declaring themselves mid-game - and asking for the game mechanics would have given it all away. So it all ended up being very low key and a bit flat with hardly any plotting or derrening. The humans won quite comfortably.