Gloom Board Game Review

Imagine if you will a world of monochrome and grey, leeched of all colour and vibrancy, a world full of mishaps and misadventures, of downfalls and dysentery, and, ultimately, an Untimely death, with the occasional unsightly skin disease thrown in for good measure. This my friends is the world of Gloom.

Now this may sound at first like a rather unpleasant way to pass your time, not to mention your hard earned cash, playing a card game with all this depressing nonsense going on when you could be playing a nice fluffy happy game with Lamas in it! Well folks you’d be dead wrong, no pun intended.

Quite the contrary, this is exactly what makes this game such a blast. Because once you get to grips with the rather simple mechanics of the transparent card laying and iconography, you are then free to let your imaginations run rampant and allow yourself to become possessed by the ghosts of Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft and thence free to give yourself over completely to the alchemy and insanity of the storytelling elements of this game!

What the Devil!?

So let’s get down to brass tacks, or should I say, sharpened stakes! The mechanics of Gloom are simple enough and after your first run through you’ll be laughing or more appropriately, crying into your cold tea if we are to keep in the spirit of the game, no time like the present to get into character.

The game of Gloom is for 2-5 players. Each player chooses one of the four families available, if you are playing a four-player game, each player discards a family member of their choice and returns it to the box, this will stop the game going on too long. If you are playing a five-player game, the fifth player uses the discarded character cards and forms a misfit family. Each Player draws five cards form the draw pile forming their starting hand, consisting of Modifier cards, Event cards, and Untimely Death cards. This is placed in the centre of the table.

You decide who is to be the first player by working who has suffered the worst day. Now this may lead to squabbling and re-enactments of old Monty Python sketches involving all players dissing another player’s miserable day by shouting ‘Ha! Luxury!’ eventually leading to a stalemate with no one willing to back down, if this is the case then the person who owns the game goes first. Or better still just grow up! First player starts the play continues clockwise.

Upon your turn you have two plays, which can be; play a Modifier, play an Event, or, play an Untimely Death Card (this you can only do when a character score has (-) self worth points), you can discard your entire hand, which is best to do on your second play, and finally pass.

You can make the same play twice; the only exception is the Untimely Death card which must be played on the first play. Some modifiers will bend this rule slightly. When playing the cards you are strategically looking to make your own character cards unhappy by giving them (-) self worth points and your opponent’s characters (+) Self worth points. This is when the transparent cards come into their own.

For example, if an opponent places a (-) self worth points card over one of his/her characters you may get the chance to cheer them right up with a healthy dose of (+) self worth points. Ha Ha! Take that! And then say another player, seeing how happy this character is, suddenly places an Untimely Death card on it, thereby killing the character and so rendering the points worthless. The lower the self worth of your characters the better because this is ultimately how you will win.

You must remember that to get your points towards ultimate worthlessness, only dead characters count towards you total points cost. The lower the points the better! And the more dead you have, the are the better!