Game Review: Gloom

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.