The concept of Gloom is rather cute in an Edward Gorey/Charles Addams sort of way. Each player has a family of 5 people and endeavors to make the worst possible things happen to them before killing them off one by one. Now, mind you, you’re trying to kill off your –own- family while making the other live happy and long lives.

The opportunities for therapy here seem boundless.

Playing negative cards on your family members earns them negative Pathos points, the goal being, to bring their Pathos to incredibly low levels before killing them off with Untimely death cards. Despite the morbidity of the theme, it’s actually quite amusing as the various Pathos follow the Gorey style of rhymes and word plays.

These can tell quite a story and trying to figure out how exactly the evil twin got ‘pierced by porcupines,’ ‘fell down a well’ and were subsequently ‘eaten by bears’…and the effect this has on your other character’s ‘stories’ was half the fun. For added challenge you can add a further twist and force yourself to rhyme everything. Storytelling and masochistic rhyming don’t give you anything point-wise, but definitely add a level or two of enjoyment.

As far as the game mechanics, the really clever bit is that the cards are printed on clear plastic. Card special effects are on the bottom and points are in one of 3 places on the side so that as you stack cards on a family member, previous points and card effect can be covered up in various combinations.

Every turn consists of two actions, both of which consist of a single card play. Only the first action can be an Untimely Death play (so you can’t add a bunch of Pathos to a character and then kill them off before your opponents can respond). Afterwards the player draws cards back up his hand limit (generally 5).

Pathos can be positive or negative. Positive Pathos cards tend to offer additional advantages like the ability to hold and draw more cards while the negative Pathos cards can cause loss of draw phase, cards or even turns. As these advantages/disadvantages are listed on the cards, they are covered up with every new play. Other cards include events that allow for more drastic rule bending such as bringing a dead character back to life. Once one family is completely deceased, all Pathos only on each player’s dead characters is added up with the lowest total being the winner.

After a single play my initial comments to this would be that the game was surprisingly enjoyable but I would attribute a lot of that to the optional storytelling (and occasional rhyming) aspect. The game itself has slightly more complexity then say, Uno, so is definitely not much of a thinker.

Perhaps the most unfortunate part of the game were the cards. While these were very artistically very well done and had flavorfully wry text on them, the choice of colors and fonts were difficult to read and forced us into a brightly lit room to play a game where more moody lighting would’ve definitely been better. The print quality was also not the best, so that some of the cards were even more difficult to read due to bad color separation or partially rubbed-off ink. Despite these minor flaws, our overall response to Gloom was quite lacking Pathos!

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Further plays muted the initial enjoyment of this game unfotunately. Probably because we tried introducing new folks to it and, as they weren't as weird as us, didn't get the same strange thrills from turning it into a macabre little storytelling game.

The card quality problems mentioned above became somewhat unbearable as well. I believe I read somewhere that it was reprinted with higher quality components... a pity there's no way to trade them in for the original 'not so great' ones.