Sparky and Santa

 For the longest of time I had a game of Dead of Winter. Four players. No, make that five - because we had two games.

Game 1: Winter Has Come

Since it had been so long when we last played this, we took the "normal" side of Winter Has Come. Not the difficult side.

My characters were the mayor and the construct worker. My secret was the Revenge, where at least three other survivors needed to die. Well, it was the long game so I thought it wouldn't be too difficult.

We also had the soldier in our midst, which was a nice combo with the construct worker. At least seven survivors would be needed in the colony to chew through their abilities. The normal way, at least. Extra spawns from crises were another matter.

The colony had absolutely hideous luck with the crises, though. Scenario needed fuel, crises needed fuel or food. There was one junk crisis, but other than that it was either of those two. Like. Wow. Morale became quite of an issue.

And that's when our doctor started to experiment on things. And the first  time she did so, she got the "bitten" result. In the colony. Only bitten result in this game, mind you. This killed two survivors, which was good for me, but trying to kill more at such low morale was risking both the whole game, and could seem really suspicious.

And as morale had nose-dived to three or so by the fourth turn, and to two or so by the fifth and we were getting tormented by the crisis deck, I just couldn't find a way to complete my secret. Because it was the revenge, I thought it might make sense in the roleplaying way to make everyone go down with me. I had the megaphone in my hand, so I might just kill everyone in a location. (Reading FAQ as I write seems to deny this, so good thing I didn't use the megaphone.)

However, since it looked very much like survivors might actually win unless last crisis would knock things over, I decided to tell everyone that I will make us all lose if I'm in the colony. So I was exiled. And funnily enough, my new secret objective was Forgiveness. I would be able to make a valiant sacrifice as my last call for forgiveness by calling zombies to my location with a megaphone.

I did already say I didn't use it, though. We actually had a betrayer whom we did not expect past turn three or so. We even helped him in his endeavor. Morale dropped to zero from a dead survivor, and game was over. Betrayer secret was something like overtake?

So, a victory for the betrayer.

Game 2: Home Sweet Home

This time we had five players. One in particular had never played the game, and had the misfortune of being a betrayer. Even then he was kind of found out accidentally and exiled soon enough. 

Then his new end condition was misplayed, and it did have major impact on what decisions was made. 

For whatever reason, handling crises was way easier this time around. Morale was almost easy to keep at or above five. However, one player in exile caused trouble in building up the main objective. As a result, colony won only on the last possible turn. That was somewhat due to unfortunate blizzard that stopped investigators from moving.

My secret objective was to vote betrayer if we had one, so that was accomplished easily enough. Frostbitten Sparky secured their loner tendencies after the mall santa offed himself on the last turn.

One player failed to stash a hoard of medicine to be a junkie, which is a weird victory condition.

Either one or two out of five failed their secret objective, but colony was barricaded from the outside world, safe and sound nonetheless.