Dead Of Winter

Number of players: 2–5 Players
Playing time: 60–120 Min
Complexity: 3.01 / 5
Age: 13+

About the game
In Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game, players lead small groups of survivors through a desperate winter in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. Your colony must complete a shared main objective while managing hunger, morale, zombies, crises, scarce supplies, and the dangerous choices that arise when survival is never guaranteed.

Players move survivors between the colony and nearby locations—including the grocery store, police station, school, library, hospital, and gas station—to search for useful items. Every trip outside carries risk: zombies accumulate, noise can attract more of them, exposure may injure or kill survivors, and the colony’s food supply must be maintained.

The group needs to work together, but each player also receives a secret personal objective. Most objectives reward contributing to the colony’s survival, but some players may secretly be betrayers whose goal is to sabotage the group. Players must decide whom to trust, whether to contribute valuable cards to crises, and when a suspicious player should be exiled from the colony.

The game’s signature Crossroads system adds story events that may trigger during players’ turns. These cards present difficult narrative choices, often forcing players to choose between the needs of individual survivors and what is best for the colony as a whole.

The colony can fail if morale reaches zero, the round track runs out, or it cannot resolve a crisis. If the main objective is completed, only players who also achieved their secret objective win. Dead of Winter combines survival strategy, hidden motives, cooperative crisis management, social tension, and branching narrative events. A fully cooperative variant is also included for groups that prefer no hidden objectives or betrayer.