Winter Opening

I visited some friends in Vaasa, and I brought a couple of board games with me. They were Dead of Winter and Small World.

We had three players for Dead of Winter. Mission for the first game was the usual "We need more samples". I had Gray Beard the Pirate and Meyers, the Psychologist, as my starting team. My personal victory condition was to equip at least four gun cards for my survivors, and drop morale to 0. Yes, I was the betrayer.

Gray Beard was terrible at searching, and psychologist was rather a bad fighter. He was a lot better at searching for stuff, so I sent psychologist to police station to gear up, and the pirate was left at the colony. He was ordered to clean the junk there, and that took a heavy toll on his dignity. First failed crisis was "Shaking things up", which made everyone to give one of their survivors for the player on right (or left?). Gray Beard the Pirate would not tolerate such insulting activities, and he deserted my betrayer party.

I got the sheriff guy with the baseball bat in his place.

The psychologist found a sniper rifle and night vision goggles at the police station, and sheriff got a cigarette lighter. That was already half of the guns I needed, so I started to consider the best possible and least suspicious was to lower morale. I tried to not contribute many cards for crisises, but suddenly another player made lowering of morale easy for me. Some kind of firefighter entered police station when there was already my psychologist and three zombies, plus a noise token. Fire fighter died to spawning zombies, and psychologist died to a zombie attracted to the place by the noise token.

Uh oh. Yeah, the morale took a dangerous dive, but now my survivors had the cigarette lighter as the only equipped gun...

Sheriff found a chemist at the gas station, who went to search for the body of psychologist at the police station. Turns and turns of frentic searching and polite asking of a gun from another player finally got me enough guns for my victory condition. However, there was something like eight samples already, so game might end very soon. Morale was at two when ninth sample was acquired, so before survivors checked for main objective, I needed to make the morale drop.

It seemed unlikely, though we did have a crisis we most likely wouldn't be able to handle.

But then suddenly a hope appears. My survivors rescue a truck driver, who moves to police station right away. He had lower influence than the chemist, so in case of additional zombies he would die first. There were three zombies at the police station, and now two survivors. Unless other players might somehow kill a zombie from police station, morale would drop for exactly two.

And that's what happened.

Crisis lowered morale, and suddenly a wild truck driver appears, who's only purpose was to go and die miserably.

I was the only betrayer. Game ending was very trigger happy.