Gloom Review

Tired of happy endings? Ready to create a tragic family story with enough wrong turns and bad lifestyle choices to make the Real Housewives look like the Cleavers? Then Keith Baker’s Gloom 2nd Edition is the game for you.

Gloom first shook up the card game world in 2005 by combining an entertaining theme and play style casual gamers could get into with innovative card design and tactical decisions to draw in serious strategists. And while the choices may require focus and planning, Gloom makes it impossible to maintain a stern façade when relating how a member of your unfortunate family was mauled by manatees (They’re fierce if you rile ‘em!) or how your patriarch, a brain in a box, found love by the lake.

Gloom’s best feature is its see-through card design, with embossed artwork and clever icon placement allowing players to fulfill a strategy and craft a narrative in the process, generating morbid laughs and odd reactions unique to this Addams family carnival freak show world where you can depress your opponents by giving one of their family members an inheritance or finding them a true love, and watch their jealousy as your character’s chastised by the church. Six icon spaces surround your character’s portrait, waiting to be filled with negative Self-Worth values during your well-timed plays or positive Self-Worth by dastardly rivals during their turn, and the combinations available due to the cards’ transparency bring the genius of Gloom’s gameplay to the fore. Modifiers cover some spots but not others and give bonuses to certain tragic conditions, all building toward the game’s morbid goal.

Too much happiness simply cannot be tolerated because triumph in the world of Gloom demands the death of your family, but only if their Self-Worth is negative, causing players to pine for the end of their poor daughter’s salad days and the return of her melancholy so they can do the right thing and kill her. The text allows, and the game encourages, storytelling during play, and some of the most memorable moments are when fellow players regale the table with tragic tales of woe, waxing poetic about Balthazar the Unfaithful Hound being terrified by topiary or Cousin Mordecai being perturbed by the pudding. Granted, the quality of the narrative depends on the creativity of your cohorts, but simply reading the text on the cards themselves provides a passable story that’s usually good for a chuckle.

The game ends when one family buries all five characters and scores are tallied, but only the results of the deceased matter, so players fight an odd battle with pura vida, seeking to banish it from their dreary lives and inflict it on their enemies. Watching faces around the table react in contrast to the latest play is the enduring legacy of Gloom; frowns and angry retorts follow a blessing and clever grins accompany dreadful news, with the well-timed play of a tragicomic end tying the character’s story off like a moldy bow on a fruitcake, eliciting a laugh, a grimace and a nod of admiration from opponents who can’t believe it’s there, can’t look away, and are oddly appreciative of the effort that went into it.

Any game involving a randomizer can have game-slowing consequences, and Gloom’s albatross is a bad draw. Not often, especially at higher player counts, but often enough the game can bog down for a few turns while players wait for a negative modifier or kill card to show up. Gameplay mitigates this somewhat, allowing players to discard instead of playing, and the second edition helps even further by allowing the discard of a player’s entire hand, effectively ending their turn but allowing them to offload all five useless cards instead of having to do it one at a time, a definite improvement over the original. Still, having your whole family suitably downtrodden and not being able to put them out of their misery, or possessing a handful of kill cards and a family full of cheerful optimists due to the luck of the draw is the lone beautiful rose marring this rotten, twisted, weed-filled bramble of a great game.

Three sequels followed the original design and the second edition of Gloom brings some of their innovations back into the core experience, streamlining the rules, tweaking player actions slightly and enhancing the unique card setup in a more intuitive way while retaining the imaginative artwork and flavor that made the game the 2005 Origins Award winner. The expansions have also received an update to better integrate with the core game, though the author states they all can work with either version. So whether you’re an OG player or new to this phenomenon, Gloom 2nd Edition offers a world full of intense gameplay and dark comedy worth visiting often.