Zombie Apocalypse & Politics: Reskinning Dead of Winter into a Cooperative Political Capital Game (Part One)

When I introduce the idea of designing games inspired by other games, lots of educators and students ask what the process looks like in action. To help others visualize the way I approach remixing and reskinning existing games, I thought I would post a series of blogs of my current game as I design it.

My wife and I love to deep dive into a show together, and we had never watched The West Wing before. What I appreciated about the show was how it deftly portrayed politics as a game of working toward the same shared goal of making the country a better place to live, all while individuals ALSO tried to fulfill their own, personal goals such as re-election, catering to special interests, securing a future gig, and more. 

As I reflected on the show’s approach, it made me realize that one of my favorite board games of all time, Dead of Winter, would make a FANTASTIC political reskin candidate. To refresh your memory, a reskin of a game is taking the game itself and changing the theme and components to match a new storyline. The best example, of course, is Monopoly and the bevy of reskins around different themes.

Dead of Winter (2014) by Plaid Hat Games.

But I digress. Let’s talk about Dead of Winter. The basic premise of the game is that you are all members of a stronghold of survivors during a zombie apocalypse. Your win condition is to meet the objectives for the round without dying. In addition, each player draws a specific win condition surrounding other aspects of playing the game. An example objective might be killing a certain number of zombies, or collecting enough of a certain item. An example of a player-specific win condition might be finding enough survivors outside of the stronghold before the game is won.

A main objective from Dead of Winter.

At this juncture, you can see where a great reskin can occur. Dead of Winter’s overall group objective and individual player objective mechanics mirror the world of politics. Yes, all politicians want their nation to thrive, but they also have personal goals and agendas. What’s fascinating about both Dead of Winter and politics is how the “players” navigate these personal and group goals and how it shapes their decision-making. When a game’s mechanics aligns with a goal you have for your target audience, it is a great opportunity to design your reskin. From an educational standpoint, reskinning Dead of Winter could help learners understand the complicated world of politics.

A player's secret objective in Dead of Winter.

 Now, I also realized that Dead of Winter cannot be a simple reskin. It also must be remixed. As a friendly reminder, a remix of a game involves taking the core mechanics of how the game works and adapting them to match your intended goals for the new game. More often than not, you’ll find that to capture the essence of your new goals or theme for a game redesign, you’ll need to do at least some remixing of the game rules, mechanics, options, and other aspects. For instance, Dead of Winter features zombies you must kill to survive. Obviously this mechanic will NOT work for a game of politics. The zombie mechanic must be remixed to better match the functions of a politician, and what context a politician might need to overcome instead of a zombie apocalypse (though now that I’m saying it out loud, Politicians vs. Zombies sounds like a fun game in itself). 

In the next blog entry, we’ll dive deeper into how I approached both reskinning and remixing Dead of Winter for a politics theme!