Too Many Stockpiles to Eat

These are last two games of Dead of Winter that were played in Vaasa.

They're first Dead of Winter games that had some other mission goal than "We must get more samples".

First we played "Stockpile" medium length mission.

I had "Justice" secret objective, where all the betrayers (if any) need to be exiled for me to win the game. Since there was such a horrible amount of zombies at the colony, I picked Mike Cho (I think) the ninja, and Sparky the stunt dog for my following.

Another players had the doctor and the nurse, and another one had the pilot and the mayor.

A couple of first turns seemed to go fairly well. Doctor was bitten while travelling, but some casualties are to be expected. Nurse started looting the hospital, and Sparky ran here and there and everywhere, being the only member of the colony that actually brought stuff to stockpile!

But then there was Mike Cho. He had been killing one to two zombies per turn, which is fine for a ninja. Then I made the mistake of ordering Mike to clean up waste in colony. Ninjas don't do that. Mike got angry and totally flipped out. "Please, Mike... clean up some waste from the colony" translated into "waste the colony" in the mind of a ninja. He found a living baby at a dumpster, and killed it. Then he killed the mayor, and afterwards he was still so angry that he killed himself.

At least that's how I saw it. In truth there was some drama because of the baby in the dumpster, and baby cried five zombies to colony when it could accommodate only three.

Though some survivors were found from non-colony locations, the survivors had their hands full just trying to survive. Somehow we managed to run out of zombie standees, and in fact all zombie spots were full at one point. Well, two had a barricade. In our defence we did manage to get all required items to stockpile, and a couple of barricades. But we needed more barricades, and at least eight or nine food tokens for the colony when the turn counter fell to zero.

We had one betrayer, though, but it was difficult to accomplish. It was the cult thingy, where betrayer following needed to have at least two more survivors than any other survivor group. But once the mayor (the cult leader) had died during the ninja incident, the head of the cult had been cut down and mantle was never transfered to anybody else.



Game 2:

Since it's boring to stop playing after such a terrible defeat, we played one more game with "Too many mouths" mission goal. With three players it has a whopping six helpless survivors at the colony right from the beginning. Goal was just to survive for five rounds.

My secret objective was "loner", and my starting survivors were Bev (the mother who kills zombies with ease once there's a helpless survivor at the colony), and the police dispatcher that was good at searching through police station. Other survivors of note were the doctor and Andrew Evans, the farmer guy.

Thanks to the farmer (who was adept at scavenging the grocery store) our colony was well fed, but we failed at solving many of the crises. Honourable mention goes to the "defend the innocents" mother, who made a gruesome example of one of the helpless survivors when they attempted to raid the food supply.

The mother became quite a "dps tank" when she also found a shotgun. That was four dead zombies per round with two dice and no exposure roll. Zombies really didn't pose much of a threat until we failed at a crisis that spawned ten of them at the colony. By then we had also found two sniper rifles from police department... getting rid of the dead was so easy that it felt like a tiresome chore to perform, not a desperate struggle...

Despite such a good start it wasn't an easy game. We ran out of fuel two times in a row in crises that required it. First we lost two morale, then we lost one morale and weren't able to perform move actions. If those were not enough, during same round two characters moved around, and both were bitten. And that's 1/12 chance. Oh well. For me it was beneficial since one of them was my police dispatcher, but for the colony this was a harsh blow overall.

Only once team effort was enough to provide a morale boosting extra success at handling a crisis, and this happened while morale was at 1.

Last turn began quite comfortably, all things considered. The colony had enough morale to fail at the next crisis. Only some nasty crossroads encounter might ruin everything any more, and those never came.

Last game all the players, even the betrayer, lost. This time all the players won. I only had the mother with the shotgun and night vision goggles as my following, so "Loner" was a success. We had exactly four barricades at the colony, which was what one of the players needed. Andrew Evans, who had been farming at the grocery store for the whole game, had also been completing the secret objective of having more cards at hand than any other player.