Gloom Review

Gloom is a non-collectable card game for 2-4 players from Atlas games with an interesting premise and an even more interesting game mechanic. Each player takes control of an eccentric family, which could easily have stepped out of a Tim Burton movie, and aims to have each member suffer the greatest misfortune and tragedy before shuffling off the mortal coil and receiving the comforting embrace of death. This may all sound incredibly morbid (and, quite frankly, it is) but the whole thing is carried off with such a wonderfully twisted sense of humour that you cannot help but play with a wry grin on your face. Think of Roald Dahl’s books or the Lemony Snicket series and you are on the right track.

The game comes with 110 transparent plastic cards and a rules sheet. Cards are either character cards, showing a member of a family (five per player), event cards, fortune/misfortune cards or untimely demise cards.

Each misfortune card has a title (e.g. Pursued by Poodles, Mocked by Midgets), some humorous flavour text, game effect and one, two or three circles with a value written in them. When these are played, they stack on top of a character of your choice. This is where the transparent nature of the cards becomes important. As more misfortunes are played, they either add additional negative modifiers, or cover up previous ones (only the uppermost in each of the 3 positions counts). Cards can also be played on your opponent’s characters, so you can place a lesser misfortune on them, or even a happy occurrence, such as a wedding, which has a positive score.

Event cards are discarded after being played and generally have a one off effect, such as swapping misfortunes between characters, allowing you to draw extra cards, or even bringing deceased characters back from the dead!

Untimely demise cards can only be played on characters with a negative self worth score and, unless later removed by an event, means the character is dead and no more cards can be played on them. Some misfortune cards have special icons representing story elements such as poison, money, or beasts. If a dead character has a visible special icon which is mentioned on the demise card, they can score extra valuable points.

The cards themselves are well made and would probably stand up to extended shuffling. My copy of the game does have a few print errors causing some of the numbers or text to be a little unclear, but this does not greatly impede gameplay. It is also possible to see the values through the backs of the cards! This is odd considering the game text and title of each is printed onto a black layer, which is all that is needed to stop them being seen through. Quite why this was not done with the most important aspect of the cards will probably remain a mystery! Another odd quirk is that Atlas games decided to print the cards on slightly frosted plastic. This does not make much sense when you consider you need to see through them, although few enough cards are played on a single character for this not to be a crippling problem.

The rules of the game are very straightforward. Each player starts with a hand of 5 cards and a player’s turn consists of playing or discarding two cards, although an untimely death may only be played as your first action. This continues until one player has managed to cause all their characters to expire, at which point the game ends and everyone adds up the value of their dead characters (living ones score nothing).

Gloom is certainly interesting to play the first few times, especially if players make a little effort in storytelling and describe how the misfortunes they play connect together. Like many simple card games, however, it does start to feel somewhat repetitive and a combination of some very powerful cards and inherent luck of the draw does not help play balance. As a result, the game does not have very high replayability - despite the novel transparent card mechanic - and its lack of depth stops it from being fully satisfying. However, Gloom is entertaining enough for the odd half hour it takes to play, especially if you appreciate the humour and want something quick and light, or at appropriate times of year - such as Halloween.

6/10

Review by Chris Walkley