Gloom

Gloom is a card game for 1 to 4 players in which each player controls an eccentric family of misfits. You try to make your own family suffer the greatest tragedies and die, while making your rivals’ families as happy and long-lived as possible. The player with the lowest Family Value wins.

Card play

Each player gets two moves per turn. Modifier cards go on top of character cards: you use them to lower your own characters’ Self-Worth with horrible mishaps, or to add positive points to opponents’ characters through happy occasions. Examples include asking penguins to poison your characters, leaving them starving in a storm or writing them out of a will; rivals’ characters might enjoy ducklings, picnics in the park or finding love at the lake.

Event cards provide other ways to change characters’ fates. You can draw cards on stormy nights, give a character a second chance at life or discard another character’s top modifier card.

Untimely deaths

Untimely Death cards let you kill a character in your family or a rival’s. Characters might be baked into a pie, eaten by bears or die old and alone. The game ends when the last character in any family dies, and the player with the lowest Family Value wins.