Dead of Winter is a mostly cooperative game in which the players try to defend a makeshift compound in a wintery apocalypse. Resources are scarce and must be scavenged. The helpless population of the compound must be protected. And beyond mere survival, each player has their own secret secondary goal they must achieve for their own personal victory: a drug addict must keep meds on hand for themselves while protecting the colony, a hoarder must keep a secret food stash while still making sure the colony doesn't starve, and so forth.
These secret roles intersect with another element of the game, a possibility that one of the characters is a traitor working toward the downfall of the colony. You can band together to banish from the colony any traitor you suspect, but the group's chances of survival go down if you eject someone who was really on your side (and just acting suspiciously for reasons of their hidden personal goal). And any banished player is still part of the game, with an updated victory condition reflecting their need to survive alone.
I surmise that this game was a hit because it's dripping with flavor, and lots of people responded favorably to this. There are dozens of characters to play, and each player starts with two: all archetypes from zombie stories (or inspired riffs on them). There's also a neat mechanic that gives the game its subtitle, "A Crossroads Game." During each player's turn, the player next to them draws a special Crossroads card, which describes a particular event trigger to watch out for during the turn. If the player does the thing described, the Crossroads card springs into action, forcing the player to make a particular choice before the rest of the game proceeds. It's a fun way of injecting twists and narrative into the game.
But the game also just doesn't feel particularly polished in playtesting. There's a massive gap in quality between all the characters; they each embrace flavor to such a degree that some are great and some are nearly useless. I suppose this is why each player gets two to start, in the hopes that every player will get at least one that's fun. That still won't always work out.
There's also a completely useless "Leader" mechanic described in the rules. Each player must designate one of their characters to be the Leader of their little survival clique within the larger group. It seems to affect only who takes the very first turn of the game, and then means absolutely nothing afterward. More than one of us scoured the rules in search of something we missed, but this seems to be a vestigial tail of something cut from the game during playtesting, or a tease toward some expansion mechanic.
With the game being so driven toward story, often at the expense of interesting gameplay, the traitor mechanic doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It's only about a ballpark 50/50 chance that any given game even has a traitor, but that possibility casts a long shadow on how people act during play. And I'm not even sure it makes all that much story sense. Yes, zombie stories often do have idiots who sell out the group -- but basically always for selfish reasons and not just because they want to watch the world burn. (Right? Am I forgetting some massive throughline in zombie stories?) The mechanic's inclusion here serves only to make you wish you were playing a better game where the traitor mechanic is more centrally featured; I'd take Battlestar Galactica over this in the "longer game length" category, for example.
Dead of Winter is more fun than other zombie games. (I'd rather play it and only it for the rest of my days than ever play Zombies!!! again once.) The Crossroads element is intriguing. But overall, this game isn't really Top 100 material in my book. I give it a B-. I'd play it again if that's what my group picked... but it wouldn't be my first choice.
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