The Long Night: Dealing With Despair

Welcome to our weekly previews for Dead of Winter: The Long Night, the stand-alone, fully compatible expansion to Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game. Click here to pre-order Dead of Winter: The Long Night from the PlaidHatGames.com store - get 20% off and the Rich Sommer exclusive character and crossroads card for free! Click here to explore MyRaxxon.com.

Did you know we've got whole bunch of other items up for pre-order too? SeaFall: A Legacy Game and 8 new summoners for Summoners Wars are available for pre-order! Plus, All US orders get FREE shipping on orders of $100 or more. So double up on some pre-orders and save!

Now that we’ve gone through all three of the modules that the game comes with, we can dig in on some of the new rules that will apply to all games of the The Long Night. Much like the explosive traps that can potentially appear in all games, there are two new important kinds of tokens: despair and unruly helpless survivors.

Morale has always represented the prevailing mood at the colony, but there are times when individual survivors will experience something (often in a crossroads card or crisis) that will emotionally scar them. This is represented by a despair token, which will count towards the total number of wounds that will cause a survivor to die.

Unlike a wound token, despair cannot be removed by normal means, even effects that say, “Remove any type of wound,” like the original medicine, or Gia’s physical therapy.

While Gia is useful in her own right, to get rid of despair, you’ll need to talk to Cole Winters.  Apparently he kept some medications in a personal stash, or maybe he just knows where stuff is kept around town.

If Cole is nowhere to be seen, you might head to the library to get this self-help book.

If despair tokens weren’t enough, now even the helpless survivors can get emotional.  Rather than getting sad and mopey, they can become ever more demanding and raucous, eating up valuable food supplies and attracting more zombies to the colony.  Much like the explosive barricades, when a crossroads or other card instructs you to, you will flip over your normal helpless survivor token and see this:

That helpless survivor will now count as two survivors for the purpose of eating food and attracting zombies to the colony.  That means that each one attracts one zombie and eats one food per round!

Be sure to come back next week as I discuss the new crisis cards!

Week 1: Why Standalone?
Week 2: Raxxon and Video Trailer
Week 3: The Bandit Module
Week 4: The Improvements Module

Come back next Wednesday for our next The Long Night preview. Click here to pre-order Dead of Winter: The Long Night from the PlaidHatGames.com store - get 20% off and the Rich Sommer exclusive character and crossroads card for free!

Written by James Sitz James Sitz is the lead playtester of Dead of Winter: The Long Night.