Tabletop Tuesday - Gloom

Welcome to another sinister edition of Tabletop Tuesday - Your weekly exploration into games of dice, cards, luck and more of the Tabletop world.

This week's morbid game...the game of bragging rights for dreadful plights that is Gloom.

Players: 2-5*
Time: 30-60 minutes
Genre: Strategy Card Game



Gloom is a most unusual card game with quite the dark humor.  Each player is given a family of five (or four if there are five players) in which their goal is to have the saddest family that is tragically killed off.  Oh woe is it to be them!  To accomplish this, players will play unhappy modifiers on their own characters, while playing happy modifiers on opponents' families to adversely affect them.  However, such is not always so straight forward.  Each unhappy card can sometimes have a negative effect, such as losing cards, while happy cards can have positive effects, such as increased hand limits.  So each card has a bit of tug and pull to be considered.  Additionally and perhaps one of the most unique features of Gloom, each card is see-through and intended to be stacked upon one another.  Therefore, certain unhappy and happy point values can be covered and canceled as they are stacked upon each other.  In this way, players can create greater point totals and counter other cards with the right card and careful consideration.

Behold the unique, see-through cards of Gloom; Designed to be stacked upon one another.

Each turn, players can play two cards, of which there are three varieties: Modifiers (described above), Event cards, and Death cards.  Event cards are one-time play cards that can have unique effects, such as clearing modifiers or playing extra cards.  Death cards are used to kill off family members and ultimately end the game.  The game ends when one player's family has been completely killed off, to which only the dead characters of each family will count towards each player's score.  The tricky part is Death cards can only be played on unhappy family members, and only as the first play of a turn (unless otherwise specified).  In this way, players will need to make their family unhappy stay unhappy for a whole round before getting the opportunity to kill them off.  And there are numerous strategies that can be had because of this.  Players may want to quickly kill off their family to prevent others from scoring more points.  Or perhaps players will want to kill off their opponent's family to minimize their points earned.  Just be careful to not allow the game to end prematurely, like catching a Golden Snitch but still having the lower score after.  It's a dreadfully embarrassing defeat.

Aside from the clever gameplay scenarios this game creates, a lot of its gruesome charm comes from the grisly tales created and shared.  Most every card has a clever play on words or colorful alliteration to tell an amusing story, such as being "mauled by matinees" or "terrified by topiary".  I recommend this game for those who have a twisted sense of humor and enjoy various degrees of clever thinking.  There are also many expansions to Gloom, each of which offer a new family for more players and a new mechanic to add  some flavor to the game's core structures.  But we'll save those for another dark and stormy night.

If you have questions about Gloom, let me know in the comments.  And stay tuned to hear more about other Gloom expansions and more haunting games in future installments of Tabletop Tuesday!