Gloom

Customer Reviews

A neat idea Review by KR

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In the game gloom your goal is to make your family of characters more and more depressed to the point where they die. While doing this you are also trying to cheer up your opponents characters. The more depressed your character is the more points their worth. So long as you have a card that will kill off a character you can choose when they die locking in their points value so in that sense it's a sort of push your luck mechanic.

The cards are very cool and are made of clear plastic so that you can overlay them over your characters. The art style in the game is also fairly cool. One thing about Gloom that may not appeal to some is the overall theme and mood of the game. When I play this game I get into the mood for some silly fun of depressing my characters and cheering up others; however, if you don't like the idea of killing off your family of characters than this game probably isn't for you. (Posted on 4/4/12)

An excellent game for the right crowd Review by sweetspot

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Gloom's humor is definitely not for everyone. My fiancee and i enjoy Gloom very much. however not so for our friends. if you don't get into the characters' miserable life. it would be boring. as for the games we played with friends. they were too serious and it ruins the game.

Gloom is a game made with very high quality, the transparent card and the artwork quality are top notched. there are tactics and strategy involved, although the focus is more on the humor of the game. (Posted on 3/17/12)

The best worst time I've ever had. Review by Colin

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Good is bad and bad is good in Gloom, a macabre little game in which the player must inflict comically morbid tragedies on his family members to lower their sense of self-worth before finally killing them to score points. With beautifully creepy artwork and often-hilarious flavour text, the cards are guaranteed to tickle the funnybone rather than chill the blood.

Gloom is a well-designed game with a simple but enjoyable mechanic that becomes more hectic as the number of players increase. The player may place "Modifiers" on family members (their own or others), play "Events" that affect gameplay, or play "Sudden Death" cards to take a family member permanently out of the running... unless they're brought back to life.

With semi-transparent plastic cards, one does not need to sleeve them for protection or to worry about overzealous players bending them beyond repair. One possible problem would be the ink starting to wear off with heavy use, but I haven't seen it happen.

Gloom, despite it's ghoulish theme, is simple enough to be enjoyed by the whole family. Watch out, though; you might be delighted by ducklings at one moment, and mauled by a manatee the next. (Posted on 1/6/11)

Fun game, even if it is a little gloomy. Great for travel and works well with players that like to get into the stories created as misfortune mounts upon the characters in each family. Recommended for people that like card based games like Munchkins and Review by Ruka

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Components:

The game consists of a deck of printed clear cards and paper black and white rules. I really liked this twist on the card design and found it could be used as part of strategy in game play.

Game Play:

The goal of the game is to make your family as miserable as possible and then kill them off. Each of the families consists of an odd ball cast of characters with a general theme linking them together. The transparency of the cards allows them to be overlaid over character cards to create or take away their happiness. Final points are tallied once one player has killed off all of their family members. Those that are deceased count for points...the more miserable they are the better....muhahaha

Recommended Playing Conditions:

Age of Players: 13+
Experience: Easy to learn. Great for people that are into Munchkins games.
Time: 15 min per player

Overall Impression:

Fun game, even if it is a little gloomy. Great for travel and works well with players that like to get into the stories created as misfortune mounts upon the characters in each family. Recommended for people that like card based games like Munchkins and Killer Bunnies. (Posted on 11/18/09)

Gloom is a card game of morbid humor. Your goal is simple - to make all five members of your family die; after living the most miserable lives possible, utterly dejected. And how do you do that? Well, by playing a variety of unfortunate situations on them Review by TR

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Gloom is a card game of morbid humor. Your goal is simple - to make all five members of your family die; after living the most miserable lives possible, utterly dejected. And how do you do that? Well, by playing a variety of unfortunate situations on them while making sure to play a variety of happy situations on your competitors.

Appearance: To start with, Gloom’s comes in a little 2 player card case that contains the two decks of cards and the rule sheet. Nothing to comment on here, it’s the usual light cardboard packaging for any deck of cards.

The cards themselves on the other hand are a different matter entirely. Gloom cards are plastic and transparent. It’s an innovation that allows players to place cards on top of one another, hiding bonuses and other card effects. I like it, it actually made the count up of points very simple – one glance and you knew how many positive and negative pathos points a character had.

There are two minor issues with this – because they are printing on plastic, the print quality is only average with some blurring occasionally. The other problem is that at times, you’re requested to have cards randomly discarded from your hands by other players. Since the cards are transparent – and bonuses come in three levels of rarity, each shown by a different dot on the left side, someone who wanted to cheat could easily pick cards that had the most number of bonuses from your hand. Not a huge issue, but still something to keep in mind.

Rules / Ease of Learning: Rules for Gloom are relatively simple, though I would have preferred a clearer write-up. They try to explain and show how each card is different in the rules, which can be difficult to pick out since differences are all in the margins of the card. We also found that the game itself played a lot simpler than what the rules made it out to be. Kudos however for the strategy tips – those were a great primer.

We took about 5 minutes to go through the rules with one another, a few minutes more to set-up properly and then started playing straight away. There was, as mentioned, very little confusion once we got the hang of the different types of cards in Gloom. There really are 3 – modifiers that add or subtract pathos points from a character, event cards that could have immediate or continuing effects (like the Untimely Death cards) and character cards.

Actual Gameplay: There are 4 families available in the base game, each of them with their own horrid, morbid descriptions. Gameplay wise, there are no actual bonuses for each family.

Each turn, players may play or discard up to two cards and then draw back to their hand maximum (normally 5). They can only play an Untimely Death card as their first card normally (unless otherwise stated on the card) and characters may only have an Untimely Death if they have a negative number of pathos points.

Modifier cards are the meat of the game – each turn you play negative modifier cards on your character to make their lives more gloomy and if you wish, positive modifiers on other players characters to make their lives better. Event cards provide well, events and shake things up a bit, from bringing dead characters back to life to killing new characters or just stopping other event cards.

When all of one family are dead and the points are tallied. Whoever has the least number (since you are making their lives miserable) of pathos points on their dead family members wins’.

That’s really the sum of Gloom mechanics wise. Theme wise, it carries it through very well since each card is generally morbid (e.g. Shamed at the Dance – with a quote about glass shoes or Suffering from Consumption) or seriously silly happy (Found Love on the Lake or Saw Ducks). The added bonus is the ability to storytell or make horrible excuses for why each card is played on each character.

Conclusion: Gloom is a fun, if morbid game. Not side-splitting laughter we found, but more black humour with a snigger or two. All the families are so horrid in their description anyway that you can’t fault the bad things happening to them. While the gameplay is light, the cards have enough variation to make the game replayable and some advanced strategies can arise. I certainly wouldn’t buy this game for children, but it’d be perfect for any Goth (or ex-Goth) or those with black humor. (Posted on 12/6/08)