Image taken from https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7234770/after-the-virus-the-long-cold

Designer: Jacob Fryxelius
Publisher: FryxGames
Artist: Daniel Fryxelius

After my more in-depth look at the base game, this one is going to be quick. I just want to point out the changes and my thoughts on what this expansion offers.

1) First off, and most importantly, this expansion makes a tough game ridiculously challenging. Like it’s unnecessarily unforgiving, frustrating, and punishing.
2) There is an added mechanic in the expansion, but the game play is not nearly different or special enough to endure the beating. The new stuff isn’t particularly innovative or fresh, so it doesn’t really change the core, repetitive game play loop.
3) As I’ve mentioned in quite a few previous reviews, I’m not a huge fan of a significant amount of luck in games and this one is no different. Overall, I don’t seem to be much of a deck building fan (there is one exception – I’ll post the review on that game one day), and this game certainly doesn’t make me consider changing that opinion. There’s a lot of luck and an insufficient amount of strategy to keep me mentally engaged and wanting to continue solving the game puzzle(s) (or lack thereof).
4) There are some new cards that are fun and different and provide nice variety and unique abilities and bonuses. There are also new characters that are enjoyable to experiment with, but one new character I genuinely found completely useless. There are new zombies in this expansion as well and they are super cool! They have special abilities that trigger at certain points in the game, which is neat, but they are also legitimately savage and have capabilities that make the game more difficult and irritating.
5) We all know I love a good campaign game, so I really thought I’d enjoy this expansion. I do enjoy that they included a campaign and many more different scenarios, but they are so tough that I lost most pretty quickly and didn’t have the desire to try them again. I had little faith that anything I could do strategically would actually be useful enough to even get me close to succeeding.

Essentially, besides the campaign aspect, I actually enjoyed the original game much more. I felt the difficulty was there, but it wasn’t insane, and I felt like there were ways I could alter my game play to potentially improve the outcome of the scenarios. Here, it’s just a constant beating besides a few chapters/stories that I was able to manage, and it wasn’t very fun for me. That said, if you like harsh, punishing games, deck builders, and/or the original After the Virus, I think the campaign aspect and changes made make it worth checking out.