Gloom

Gloom hands you a rulebook that describes a perfectly ordinary card game, and then the actual experience has almost nothing to do with it. On paper you’re managing Self-Worth scores, stacking Modifier cards, and racing to kill off your family before your opponents kill theirs. In practice, none of that matters if you can’t improvise a decent story about why Great-Aunt Elissandre was trapped on a train.

I’ve watched this exact split happen at my own table. The mechanics are the scaffolding. The game is what your group builds on top of it, and that’s either the best thing about Gloom or the reason it never gets played twice.

Why Gloom Feels Like a Group Improv Exercise Wearing a Card Game’s Clothes

Strip away the storytelling and here’s what’s actually left: on your turn you make two plays, mostly stacking Modifier cards that add or subtract points, then draw back up to five cards and pass the turn. That’s it.

It’s a light, fairly abstract points game with a dark reskin, and if you play it that way, several of my sessions have confirmed exactly what you’d expect: it gets old fast. The rulebook itself all but admits this in its “For Beginners” section, which suggests new players just ignore card effects to learn the basics.

Ignore the effects long enough and you’ve ignored most of the actual strategy too.

The real game only shows up when someone commits to explaining every play out loud. Why was Helena trapped on a train? How did she meet the spouse she married while still imprisoned there? The rulebook’s own example follows that exact thread, and it’s not decoration, it’s the instruction manual for how you’re supposed to be playing.

The problem is that nothing in the rules enforces this. Storytelling is a request, not a mechanic, and the entire experience lives or dies on whether your table treats it as mandatory.

That’s why player count matters more here than in almost any other card game I review. Three players is the sweet spot in my experience, enough voices to keep the stories layered without any one person waiting too long for their turn. Four starts to push it, turns get longer, attention drifts.

Five works if everyone’s genuinely committed, using a scratch family built from the leftover characters after the four-player discard, but it’s asking a lot. And the single fastest way to kill the table isn’t a bad roll or a mistimed card, it’s one person who won’t play along. I’ve seen it happen exactly the way you’d predict: four people building an increasingly absurd tale, one person getting visibly impatient, and the whole thing deflating within twenty minutes.

Gloom doesn’t have a mechanism to route around a skeptic. It just needs one.

Gloom’s Scoring Doesn’t Matter, and That’s the Whole Argument

Here’s the part of the rulebook that trips people up if they read it too literally: the winner is whoever has the lowest total Family Value, calculated only from the visible Self-Worth points on their own dead characters.

Living characters contribute nothing. Your opponents’ dead characters contribute nothing to your score. You are purely optimizing for how miserable you can make your own family look on paper before they die.

Which raises the obvious question: if scoring is just arithmetic, why does everyone who’s actually played this game insist that winning is beside the point? Because the two ways people approach Gloom produce genuinely different experiences, and I don’t think either side is wrong.

Play to optimize your Family Value and you’ll do fine, stacking negative Modifiers on your own characters and positive ones on your opponents’, following the rulebook’s own guidance almost mechanically. Play to tell the best story and follow wherever the flavor text leads you, and you’ll often find the two goals pull in completely different directions, since the funniest narrative beat is rarely the mathematically optimal play.

I’ve sat at tables where the person telling the better story lost on points and didn’t care even slightly, and other tables where a quieter, more calculating player took the win everyone else forgot to chase. Both nights were fun. Neither table would agree on what “playing well” actually means, and I’ve stopped trying to reconcile that. It’s baked into the design.

The one thing I will say plainly: don’t take the scoring seriously enough to let it drive your plays. The moment Gloom becomes about winning the arithmetic, it turns into what it looks like on paper, a fairly repetitive stacking game, and you lose the entire reason to own it over something sharper and more strategic.

Is Gloom Worth It? Who Should Actually Buy It

Buy it if your group is the kind that leans into a bit, the kind willing to spend three minutes explaining exactly how Mister Giggles ended up trapped in a closet with Mister Eyeball Plucker. If that sentence made you grin, you already know whether this game belongs on your shelf, and it’ll fit right in with the rest of your party games collection.

It’s cheap, it teaches in five minutes, it travels well, and the transparent card mechanic alone is worth seeing in person even if you end up only playing it a handful of times.

Skip it if your group tends to play things straight, or if you’ve got even one person who’s going to sit out the storytelling and just move cards around. I’ve watched that single dynamic turn a genuinely clever game into a flat, forgettable one, and there’s no house rule that fixes a bored table. Skip it too if you want a game with real strategic depth.

Once you strip away the improv, there isn’t much underneath, and repeated plays without the storytelling wear thin fast.

One structural gripe worth setting expectations for before you buy: the game only ends once an entire family has died, and getting there can take longer than the rest of the experience earns.

If your table finds itself checking the clock in the back half of a game, don’t be afraid to house-rule an early ending, once a family crosses a set negative threshold rather than requiring every character to be dead. It tightens the pacing without touching anything that actually makes the game work.