YMMV / Dead of Winter

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Annaleigh Chan's Crossroads card. She claims she only lost her one case due to a racist jury. We only have her word for it, and there's no other evidence of racism in the game. Given that she's ready to set zombies free from the prison or blow her brains out, it's easy to conclude she's simply lying to herself.
  • Invoked with Anita Wallace, as it's not known what she does. Other than the fact that she's terrible at what she does.
  • Cole Winters. His admittedly powerful special ability triggers if a player discards a card, which makes him seem pretty helpful. But his Crossroads card paints him as vindictive, and would leave someone to die if they called him "shorty".
• Game-Breaker:
  • It depends on the Main Objective or the player's secret objective, but usually, getting luck of the draw with some survivors makes the game easier. If your objective is to have survivors, Gabriel Diaz is invaluable. If you need medicine, Janet Taylor is the best. For weapons, the best is Carla Thompson. Sophie Robinson and Talia Jones can search with ease, Thomas Heart and Gray Beard are the best fighters. Sparky also makes the game much easier since he cannot roll a One-Hit Kill.
  • The sniper rifle lets you kill any zombie you want in play, no die roll or exposure needed.
  • One crossroads card lets you draw seven cards at the police station, keeping any weapons. In exchange, you have to keep the Police Station, Hospital, and Grocery Store free of zombies at the end of the game. If the Main Objective does not require surviving for so many turns, it can be completed before zombies are added, making this objective a breeze. Getting the aforementioned sniper rifles can also make this game much easier.
  • The Football Pads in the expansion allow the player to ignore bitten results.
  • Some of the improvements make the game much easier. The bedding can remove despair or grant the character an extra action die each round, the treatment center completely heals one survivor each round, the fireplace makes frostbite no longer occur in the colony.
  • Felicia Day's ability allows her to do almost all of the Crossroads cards, making the game far easier since she can fulfill any role that'll give bonuses.
• High-Tier Scrappy: In general, the best characters were Loretta Clay, Mike Cho, Marcus Johnson, Ashley Ross, Thomas Heart, and Danica Walker. Sparky was also considered to be very useful since he had good die rolls and could avoid a One-Hit Kill, and promotional character KD James let players avoid this with medicine cards. Bev Russell and Rocco Bellini were considered valuable because it was very easy to take advantage of their skills, and their high fight abilities made defending the colony easy. The other set of good characters were the characters that let players take an extra card every search action: Carla Thompson, Andrew Evans, Arthur Thurston, Alexis Gray, Janet Taylor, and David Evans. Gabriel Diaz and Emma Han allowed the player to dig through decks and hopefully get useful cards, which made them a bit more situational, but still very effective. Oscar Rios is also extremely useful because he can bring more life out of the extremely useful fuel cards. Meryl Wolfe's power can let her prevent a fail effect of the crisis (and potentially figure out the group's betrayer) Finally, John Price could copy almost all of these survivor abilities, making him just as effective.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Forest Plum has no special abilities of note and his stat rolls are unimpressive. Hugo Valentine's special ability is a poor man's version of Rod's, and his stat rolls alone don't make up for it. Fatima Mahktabi's special ability requires her to discard cards, and her other ability is situational at best. Hawk Wheeler's ability is considered very chancey, Rohan Patil's stats are terrible and his abilities don't really make up for it.
• The Scrappy: Forest Plum and Anita Wallace are this In-Universe. Interviews with the developers remark that people never enjoyed playing Brandon Kane.
  • Blue the Chimp will designate one of the survivors as "Barry" and constantly harass them.
• The Woobie:
  • All of the survivors, as they are scrambling for their lives in the cold and against zombies. But Bev Russell stands out, as she lost (and must potentially confront as a zombie) her elementary-school aged son. In the expansion, Rocco Bellini was forced to kill his own child, and may have to kill another one, causing him despair.
  • On one of the cards, you can find your dead mother and zombified father. The latter of which you must kill.