Key Designer: Klaus Teuber
Distributor: Mayfair Games

As I mentioned earlier, Catan was one of the first games that helped me recognize the beauty of gaming and game night. My first encounter with Settlers of Catan was a prolonged affair, attended by the ceremony of clearing our dining room table for play space and fishing out snacks from the kitchen cabinet. My brother, opening the board game with much care, presented it along with a set of simplified rules for each of us to read and refer to throughout our first game. Catan was the first resource management game I encountered.

The rules of Catan were easy to understand within a few turns. The board consists of hexagonally-shaped resource pieces (brick, lumber, wool, grain, and ore) numbered from 2-12 with token counters. At the beginning of the game, each player sets up two settlements and four roads. A player’s turn consists of three parts: rolling the dice, collecting resources, then trading resources and/or purchasing settlements, cities, roads and/or development cards. The dice roll determines which resources are rewarded. If the dice roll amounts to 12, for example, the resource with the corresponding number is awarded to players with connecting settlements. Victory Points are awarded for settlements, cities, roads, certain development cards, and achievements (i.e. largest army or longest road). The first player with 10 VP wins the game.

Catan requires a combination of skill, cooperation and luck. It takes a knowledgeable player to position settlements and ration resources, a good negotiator to obtain needed resources from others, and a bit of luck with the dice to gather the rest of the resources (during one game, for example, I monopolized ore in my position between the usually rare numbers 11 and 10. For the entire game, 11 and 10 seemed to be the only numbers rolled and I won the game based on this lucky streak). The game allows for a variety of techniques to obtain VP.

As my review has shown, Catan is a good game. Unfortunately for me, game play can run kind of long. When you sit down to a game of Catan, be ready to spend about two hours on it (sometimes even three!). I know that by most standards this wouldn’t be considered long, but I played Catan shortly after playing Gloom and found Catan to be painfully slow in comparison. As with all games, gather the right mix of players who jibe well with your play personality and you’re sure to have fun. Combine a deliberate thinker with a game like Catan, which allows so many options, and impatient players like me could have a torturously long experience ahead of them.

That being said, Catan is a good game, but not a great game in my books. I have to be in a specific mood to play Catan: ready for a relatively long game with long turns of negotiations. These things may signify an amazing game for others, but I enjoy a game that’s fast-paced and allows one to lose oneself – if not in the other players then at least in the play experience itself. Personally, I think Catan has great mechanics, but doesn’t do enough to push me beyond the realm of participating in the game to actually living the game and becoming seriously invested in it. Mere resource gathering and distribution does not do enough to attract me. Instead, I enjoy a game that presents an entire package, and this package includes, not just its end aim (the point of winning), but its design and the story it creates too. Unfortunately, I feel Catan is lacking in the latter two criteria; it doesn’t do enough to create a story and it’s not the most attractive game either. I know I’m not expressing the predominant opinion (almost all reviews are unanimously in favor of Catan), but I am expressing it honestly from the point of view of a generally impatient, very demanding gamer and hope it may benefit others with similar tastes out there too.

Key Designer: Keith Baker
Art: Scott Reeves
Distributor: Atlas Games

As I mentioned earlier, my first bout with Gloom was fast. My co-worker busted out his pack in the lunchroom and we finished a condensed game within a half hour. Much of what appealed to me in that first half hour is what still attracts me to Gloom now: it boasts an innovative game design, captivating art, and quick game play.

The rules are easy: Each player has a family of five misfits, which they strive to make as miserable as possible while blessing other players’ families with with happy occasions. The game ends when one player’s entire family is dead. The player with the most miserable family wins.

A player’s turn consists of two parts: drawing cards up to the draw limit and playing two cards. The Gloom pack contains four different card types: characters, events, modifiers and death cards. Modifiers bestow either positive or negative points on characters and are often accompanied by rule modifications that can alter a player’s game play for a while, death cards are used on characters to end their miserable lives (relatively straightforward there), and event cards mix up game play (e.g. blocking deaths or removing all of a character’s modifiers). Cards may be played on any character in the game – your own or another player’s.

Cards are transparent with beautifully drawn images by Scott Reeves. The transparencies allow players to layer modifiers on characters while keeping them visible underneath and providing a “face” for the misfortune all throughout the game. Although the game’s objective sounds morbid, its content is wryly humorous, encouraging whacky storytelling as a great addition to game play. Exactly HOW did Lord Slogar fall into that well and how did he marvelously marry so soon afterwards?

Best of all, Gloom is easy to learn and easy to play, though not too easy to preclude experienced players from exercising skill and technique. Everything you need is completely accessible – sans a momentous learning curve to access it. Just feel like throwing cards around for a while? Gloom would be a great game for you. Or do you feel like engaging in a cunning game of misfortune? Gather the right players, and Gloom is good for that too. To top it all off, the play time is also short– 20 min to an hour – so you can play a quick game to kill time or multiple games in one night for an entire gaming event.

Gloom is, thus far, my favorite card game. I’m a sucker for things that look nice, feel nice, and play nice and Gloom does all of those things. It has the added bonus of being the exciting first addition to my newly founded game collection and of showing me that games can be enchanting, off-the-wall excursions from those vanilla days of dictionary-thumping Scrabble. It’s not bad in my books.