Overview
Control an eccentric family of misfits and make their lives as miserable as possible. Heap tragedies and untimely deaths on your own family while cheering up your opponents’. The family with the most suffering when all their members are dead wins.
Ryan’s Review
Likes
- Easy to learn
- The transparent, stackable cards are genuinely innovative
- Storytelling element creates hilarious moments
- Good strategic depth for a card game
Dislikes
- Morbid theme won’t work with every group
- Stories can run dry over time
- Transparent cards can inadvertently reveal your hand
First Impressions
I first heard about Gloom at a board game café. “It’s really morbid but really fun — you have to try to kill off your family to win.” That was enough to intrigue me. It kept getting pushed down the buy list because it felt like a micro-game rather than a full strategy experience, but it kept getting recommended. Eventually we played it. Worth it.
Thoughts
The cards are the first thing you notice — and they’re genuinely one of the coolest card designs I’ve ever seen. They’re transparent and stackable. When you play modifier cards on a character, the +/- point values layer visibly on top of each other. It’s a mechanic built directly into the physical form of the card. Clever.
How the scoring works: play negative-value modifier cards on your own family to make them miserable. Play positive-value cards on opponents’ family to cheer them up. Once a character has negative net points, you can play an untimely death card to kill them. First player to kill their entire family with the most negative points wins.
The non-linearity keeps the game unpredictable. Characters can flip from suffering back to happiness and back again. Even dead family members can be resurrected with the right card. This randomness prevents the game from becoming a simple race — it makes the outcome genuinely unclear until someone’s last family member dies.
Symbol interactions add depth. Many cards have symbols that interact with other cards, granting extra draws, bonus negative points, or triggering effects. This creates a layer of combo-finding that rewards repeated play without requiring it.
The storytelling element is hit or miss by group. You’re meant to narrate what’s happening to each character as you play cards. With the right group, this becomes increasingly absurd and hilarious. With the wrong group, it falls flat. It’s optional — the game holds up without it.
The transparent card flaw is real. If you’re not deliberate about how you hold your hand, opponents can get a read on what you’re holding. Not catastrophic, but worth knowing.
Conclusion
Gloom is well-constructed as a card game — good depth, meaningful interaction, genuinely interesting mechanics. The morbid theme is a real filter: it won’t work with every group, and that’s okay. For groups with dark humour and a taste for card games with actual strategy, it’s a great find at a low price. Not an every-session game, but a great shelf game you’ll be glad you own.
