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

I love this game so much. If you have bought the original, this adds so much to it. You can also play this addition as a standalone though, which I appreciate. It’s fairly simple to understand in terms of the rules.The game goes as follows: at the beginning of the game, you will choose an objective card. It will tell you how the game needs to be set up, how many rounds, and how much morale you start with. It obviously also tells you the main objective to win the game. You will also pass out character cards and item cards. Each character possesses their own ability that you can typically use once per turn (unless it is a passive ability). Some abilities require dice with a certain amount, and some don’t. If playing with the non-betrayal and betrayal cards, you will also need to complete that objective on the card you get. The beginning of each round will have an event card that you want to complete or suffer the consequences. Each player during their turn can turn in items to the event card. During your turn, you can move, search, attack zombies (or bandits), as long as you still have dice. You roll a specific die when moving (unless you play a card that prevents that), that will either give you frostbite, a wound, kill you, or nothing happens. But be careful, during a players turn, you might trigger an event to happen when moving, searching, attacking, etc. The main goal, try to survive and complete your objective.This edition comes with bandits, and these special zombies that you have to try to contain at Raxon. You can play with as many or as little additions as you want. You can simply just play the game with the main objective to familiarize yourself or if you want a simple game. The fun part is the unknown and unpredictability of events. Your favorite and most equipped character can get killed off in an instant. But that’s how an apocalypse goes. It took awhile for us to get a couple wins under our belt, and the game went different every time. You can replay this game 1000 times and it would still give you a new experience.If you love co-op (and betrayal) games, or if you simply like something a little bit more challenging and thought provoking, this game is for you. It’s survival and challenging and unpredictable at times (many times). If you have time during game night, pull this out because it can be a long one. I wouldn’t play this with children, as it typically takes a lot of strategy, but it’s not impossible for a child to understand. Our game nights consist of adults, so this is always a favorite. Overall, I love this game and it’s definitely a staple at our game nights.

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!

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.

My eldest son and I love this game. Modern board games have elevated to a truly amazing level. Win or lose we have so much fun, even with a mix of teens and adults. It is not a simple game though. Takes some practice to remember all the steps and nuances. But well worth it. Good Luck and Happy Shopping.