Until Next Winter
Until next winter is a deck-building card game for 2-4 players with both coop and player vs player modes of play. Each game is different, every day offers new suffering. Easy to learn hard to master it is a game that keeps you coming back for more as you try to survive in the woods. Shunned by your village, with only your fellow exiles for company you will have to work together in true cooperation. Depend on each other for help and trust each others skills.
Your crimes are unspoken. The verdict; guilty. Your punishment, exile. You do not know how far from the village you are taken. Deep in the woods in the still hours of an early summer night the hoods are taken off. Dazed and disoriented you are left to your fate. To live or die. With nothing but your fellow condemned to keep you company. As the morning light slowly reveals your new home in shades of grey the deep woods comes alive around you.
You and your fellow exiles must survive as long as you can in the
wilderness. Each season you will face increasingly difficult challenges If any player succumbs to perils of the woods all is lost. You live together or you die together.
And if you survive there is always next winter…
The game takes place over three seasons in early iron age Scandinavia. During play communication is key to survival. As each card is played each player may respond to the card played but only in a limited manner as trust is a resource long since gone and each exile is secretly knowing only one will die alone. How you respond to cards played is up to you but only one response may be chosen by each player for each card played. Can you figure out how your fellow exiles think and feel before it is too late?
Commonly you will have a situation where a card is played that would help you but enough of that resource is already played. Do you suddenly start saying that you don’t need the resource played or will you remind your fellow exiles that the resource played is needed by you also? Learning how to read your fellow exiles subtle hints is key to survival.
A quick intro on how to play until next winter.
Each day begins with each player drawing 5 cards from their decks and adding those cards to their hand.
After each players hand for the day is established each player draws an amount of encounters equal to the current season; 1 encounter for summer, 2 for autumn and finally 3 encounters for winter.
Now that that the days is properly set up each player gets to play 3 times playing 1 card at a time in a clockwise order. The players may choose who goes first and it is often important who goes first as you will need to figure out who needs which resource and how much as quickly as possible in order to survive.
As a deck building game you will have to balance solving your encounters with maximizing your crafting to improve your deck for the coming days.
When all players have played 3 times all players discard any cards remaining in their hands.
Now comes the big reveal as all encounters are turned face up. Encounters once revealed stay revealed. This will help you survive days where you have more encounters to deal with than those drawn at the start of the day. Resolving the encounters it is recommended you go through them one resource at a time matching them with the suffering on the encounters. Total up the resources of one type and the total up the suffering of the corresponding type until no more suffering remains unresolved.
Discard all encounters that are fully resolved and move on to crafting. All cards that you craft are added to your discard pile. Once crafting is complete discard all the cards played during the turn except those cards under the keep ability.
The order of play in its simplified form becomes:
1 Draw
2 Encounter
3 Play
4 Resolve
5 Craft
6 Clean up.
Easy to learn hard to master. Can you survive winter?