Game: Gloom

Some time back Yummy and I went to an internet convention called Intervention. I went to see some of the people whose comics I read online and Yummy was there to see if there were any ideas she could steal for the conventions she puts on. One of the rooms we liked best was the game room. Along one wall were tables filled with games you could play. Another wall was lined with shelves full of games you could buy. And the girl working there? Her job is to play the games with people. She teaches you the game, if you like it, you buy one. Rough life, right?

One of the games that caught our attention was "Gloom". Mostly because all of the cards are transparent. So we looked a bit closer. The point of the game is to make people as miserable as possible. Alas, there were no copies for sale. I'd kept an eye out for it for several months after that. Finally, we just ordered a copy.

It's for 2 - 4 players ages 13 and up. There are four families, each with five family members. The object of the game is to make your family members more miserable than the other families, and when you think you can't make them any more miserable you kill them.

The hands for a two player game

Some of the cards you place on top of family members.

Look closely at the cards shown above. Red dots have negative numbers, black dots have positive, grey dots are zero. You can see that down the left side of the card there are spaces for 3 dots.  You place these cards over the characters. As the stack of cards builds on a character you'll see their value plummet and climb as dots overlap and mask those on previous cards. Only the dots you can see matter. And when you think your character is a miserable as you can safely make it, or when an opponent's character is having a good day, you kill them using the cards with gray text boxes at the bottom.

The Blackwater clan mid-game.

The game ends when one whole family is dead. Once that happens you count up the points. Lowest score wins. But only dead family members can be counted. Yummy totally had me out scored, but her family tended to live longer than mine so I won because I had more dead people with slightly bad days than she had dead people with really bad days.

The game recommends that you embellish the bad stories. Half the fun, they say, is telling about how everything went wrong. I recommend drinking a bit to help you with the stories.