Gloom Chronicles Review

Introduction to Gloom

I was introduced to the card game Gloom two years ago, on a Halloween trip to the Lake District with my family. Gloom is a wonderful storytelling game, where each player has a family of five people (sometimes including servants and pets) and they compete to have their family live the most unhappy lives before dying. Life in Gloom is hard and miserable and the only consolation available is that no one else has it quite as bad as you do! The most striking thing about Gloom is its translucent playing cards. As you layer horrible happenings upon your characters, you can either see them stack in miserableness or new experiences can obscure older ones, depending on the positioning on the card. It gives the game a really distinctive look and works really well in practice too.

Gloom also has a wonderful art and narrative style that matches the melancholy misery of the game perfectly. It owes a lot to Edward Gorey, Lemony Snicket and the Addams Family and is both dark and somewhat absurd.

As we played more and more games, we found we were all going for the same families each time, and there would be references and call-backs to earlier games emerging in our storytelling as we enriched our own version of the Gloom mythos.

Gloom Chronicles

This is what Gloom Chronicles plays so well too. It’s not a traditional Gloom expansion, like Unhappy Homes or Unwelcome Guests, which add new families, cards and rules. Gloom Chronicles has 20 cards, each one is larger than a regular Gloom card, more of a tarot card size, and they’re not the translucent style of the regular Gloom cards either. They’re black card with lots of foil to give them a lovely shimmer and shine. Each card has been given a chapter number, from one to twenty, as well as a title.

Chapter by Chapter

Each Gloom Chronicles chapter card adds several new elements to a standard game of Gloom. Firstly, each one has a specific scenario outlined in a paragraph or two. This could be an unhappy birthday party, an airship ride or a horrible holiday. That becomes the setting for your game of Gloom. All of your stories about the terrible things happening to your characters should then fit in with whichever chapter you are playing.

Each chapter card also introduces a new rule into the game. Some of these are very simple, with little or no impact on game play, such as having to sing “Happy Deathday” to the final character to die at the end of the game. Others can turn a game upside down, like changing the victory conditions for two families in a feud, or changing the action economy of the game.

Once the game is finished, the winning player turns over the chapter card and on the reverse side of each card there are two options for where to go next. It becomes like a choose-your-

own-adventure book as you decide which of two chapters you go to for your next game. All of the dead characters come back to life and the story continues into another horrible scenario. And that’s the real appeal of Gloom Chronicles. It spins the game out into more of an ongoing campaign, as you build up your stories to something much larger and more gloriously miserable for every character involved.

But they died!

There’s one element of this that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, when you think about it for more than a few seconds. Gloom is a game all about killing off your characters, after reducing their self-worth as much as possible, and before your opponents can kill off their own characters. Narratively, it’s a little odd in Gloom Chronicles to then bring everyone back to life at the end of a dire dinner party so they can be trapped on the train home. It’s not a game that naturally lends itself to continuing the story past the conclusion of a single game. One does need to suspend disbelief and just accept this anomaly and go with it.

Gloomier and Gloomier

The final piece of information on each Gloom Chronicles chapter card is an instruction on how to set up each game. In total Gloom Chronicles refers to six different products, the core Gloom game, Gloomier: A Night at Hemlock Hall and the four Gloom expansions, Unhappy Homes, Unwelcome Guests, Unfortunate Expeditions and Unquiet Dead. Many of the chapters need both the core Gloom and one of the expansions to play. Only nine out of twenty chapters just use the core Gloom set, and if you don’t have the expansions it greatly limits the options you have to continue your adventure. If you do have all or most of them, then Gloom Chronicles will give you a great way to shake your games up by telling you which sets to leave in and which ones to leave out, or which guests, stories or expeditions you should use.

Final Thoughts

We have had a lot of fun introducing Gloom Chronicles into our games. It adds a few fun little twists to the gameplay without over complicating things and it turns the Gloom card game into something akin to a legacy game without having to add too much to it. The different scenarios help to stimulate our imaginations and give us fun settings for our stories to play out in. The cards are gorgeous, with a rainbow sheen to the foil when it catches the light just right, and the artwork on them goes perfectly with the rest of the Gloom set. However, the larger size makes storing them a little frustrating as they don’t fit neatly with my existing cards. The ability to choose your own path from card to card gives a nice little reward to the winner of each game, as they get to choose where we go next, as we weave a larger narrative through our games. At the moment we only have the core Gloom set and Unhappy Homes, which limits it somewhat but the principle still works and it’ll only improve as we add more expansions to our collection.

While there are only twenty cards, replayability is good. The route you choose through the cards can change, and even if you go to the same chapter, there’s tremendous scope for new stories with new families or the same favourite ones, as the cards guide new narratives.