Introduction
Gloom is a fantastic, fun card game about unhappy families. Everything in the world of Gloom is miserable, bleak and darkly despairing, with death providing the only means of escape. The only comfort that can be found there is to ensure that your family have the best, the bleakest, the most despairing stories to tell before their eventual demise. To achieve this, you can play cards that add to their story while reducing their Self-Worth. Maybe they’re tried for treason, or they were stabbed in the study before being mangled by mimes. You can also play positive cards on your opponents’ characters, as they are praised in the papers or star on the stage, improving their Self-Worth. A gruesome death awaits though, and there are a number of Untimely Death cards that will finish off a character, as they are found in the furnace, stirred into the stew or maybe they just die of sheer shame. Once a whole family of five characters has died, each player calculates the Self-Worth scores of their dead characters, and the family with the lowest total score, or Family Value, is declared the most miserable winner.
Morbid, much?
As you can probably tell from that description, this is a fairly dark and morbid game. It is, however, all done with a lot of humour and a wonderful style. It leans heavily into the style of Edward Gorey, with touches of Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events and the Addams Family. These are miserable deaths with a comic touch, as the unfortunate events befalling your family reach ridiculous levels. How those events, and the deaths that follow them, are portrayed is also up to the people playing the game, as it’s up the the players to narrate the events, adding context and depth to the stories rather than just slapping cards down. The way stories unfold in this way is one of my favourite elements of Gloom, as regular groups establish recurring motifs and call-backs to earlier games and the random nature of a card drawing game adds an interesting element to the storytelling aspect.
Dismal Dwellings
The Gloom Unhappy Homes expansion adds several new elements to the core Gloom game, and it can be combined with any of the other expansions. One big expansion feature is the introduction of residences. Each family in the core game and the new family included in this expansion gets a new residence, themed to that particular family, from the sinister sideshow of Dark’s Den of Depravity to the mysterious manor of Hemlock Hall. These residences start the game in play, alongside your family members, can’t die or have regular modifier cards played on them, but contribute to your Self-Worth points to calculate your final Family Value. Instead of modifier cards, Residence cards can have Mysteries played on them, contributing both to the story and a special effect that remains in play as long as that Mystery card effect is showing. So you might add Hemlock Hall and the Menacing Menagerie or Castle Slogar and the Teatime Terror to your story, or you might play a Mystery on to one of your opponents’ residences, changing their play conditions instead of your own. The Mystery cards don’t seem hugely powerful, so they never really threaten to overbalance the game, but they’re good enough to add an interesting new dynamic into your games and having the residence to go alongside the family really helps with the sense of place, adding a powerful new story element.
Introduction
Gloom is a fantastic, fun card game about unhappy families. Everything in the world of Gloom is miserable, bleak and darkly despairing, with death providing the only means of escape. The only comfort that can be found there is to ensure that your family have the best, the bleakest, the most despairing stories to tell before their eventual demise. To achieve this, you can play cards that add to their story while reducing their Self-Worth. Maybe they’re tried for treason, or they were stabbed in the study before being mangled by mimes. You can also play positive cards on your opponents’ characters, as they are praised in the papers or star on the stage, improving their Self-Worth. A gruesome death awaits though, and there are a number of Untimely Death cards that will finish off a character, as they are found in the furnace, stirred into the stew or maybe they just die of sheer shame. Once a whole family of five characters has died, each player calculates the Self-Worth scores of their dead characters, and the family with the lowest total score, or Family Value, is declared the most miserable winner.
Morbid, much?
As you can probably tell from that description, this is a fairly dark and morbid game. It is, however, all done with a lot of humour and a wonderful style. It leans heavily into the style of Edward Gorey, with touches of Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events and the Addams Family. These are miserable deaths with a comic touch, as the unfortunate events befalling your family reach ridiculous levels. How those events, and the deaths that follow them, are portrayed is also up to the people playing the game, as it’s up the the players to narrate the events, adding context and depth to the stories rather than just slapping cards down. The way stories unfold in this way is one of my favourite elements of Gloom, as regular groups establish recurring motifs and call-backs to earlier games and the random nature of a card drawing game adds an interesting element to the storytelling aspect.
Dismal Dwellings
The Gloom Unhappy Homes expansion adds several new elements to the core Gloom game, and it can be combined with any of the other expansions. One big expansion feature is the introduction of residences. Each family in the core game and the new family included in this expansion gets a new residence, themed to that particular family, from the sinister sideshow of Dark’s Den of Depravity to the mysterious manor of Hemlock Hall. These residences start the game in play, alongside your family members, can’t die or have regular modifier cards played on them, but contribute to your Self-Worth points to calculate your final Family Value. Instead of modifier cards, Residence cards can have Mysteries played on them, contributing both to the story and a special effect that remains in play as long as that Mystery card effect is showing. So you might add Hemlock Hall and the Menacing Menagerie or Castle Slogar and the Teatime Terror to your story, or you might play a Mystery on to one of your opponents’ residences, changing their play conditions instead of your own. The Mystery cards don’t seem hugely powerful, so they never really threaten to overbalance the game, but they’re good enough to add an interesting new dynamic into your games and having the residence to go alongside the family really helps with the sense of place, adding a powerful new story element.
Other expansions that add new families also include the respective residences for that family, ensuring that multiple expansion sets can easily be combined together.
Starving Artists
One of my favourite additions in Gloom Unhappy Homes is the new family, the bohemian artists and models of Le Canard Noir. There’s Rosseau, the patchwork painter, Marie DeLaCroix, the misunderstood model, Belladonna, the consumptive courtesan, James DeWinter, the penniless poet and Simon Simone, the androgynous actor. Now, family choice in Gloom is all just a matter of feel, as there is no mechanical advantages to starting with one over another, but these five have rapidly become my go-to choice. That bohemian style just really speaks to me, evoking thoughts of Toulouse-Lautrec’s Paris, An American in Paris, Moulin Rouge, and so many other films, stories and artwork bursting in inspiration for storytelling with these characters. It’s something very different to the core Gloom families, with their mad scientists, creepy aristocracy, scary circuses and murderous farmers, but it fits right in with the style and the mythos of the world, adding a fun and mysterious artistic element.
Additionally, the addition of a new family in Gloom Unhappy Homes means that you can play with an additional player, taking the player count from 2-4 up to 2-5 when combined with the core set, or higher with one of the other expansions that include families.
Everything Else
Along with the Residence and Mystery cards and the new family, Gloom Unhappy Homes has a full deck of new Modifier, Event and Untimely Death cards. Some of these I referenced in my introduction, and they offer a good selection of new things to freshen up your games, adding more diversity without doing anything potentially game-breaking. The general balance is similar to the core Gloom game, with big negative Self-Worth modifier cards coming with a generally unhelpful secondary effect and big positive Self-Worth modifiers offering a benefit as well, making you have to think carefully about whether it’s best to go big or to eek out those miserable experiences in smaller doses. There’s even a new Modifier card with the very rare duck symbol on it, as characters run the risk of being poisoned by penguins.
Unique Style
One of the things I love about the Gloom card games is the way the cards have been designed. Each card in the game is printed on transparent plastic, so as cards are played onto your characters, they overlay previously played cards. Some elements of those earlier cards are now obscured by the new card, others will show through, providing a very clever cumulative effect. Then, when you play an Untimely Death card, it covers up the family member’s portrait with a comically grim raven sitting on a skull.
The art in Gloom Unhappy Homes is gorgeous. While most of the cards don’t have full illustrations on them, being transparent, the family cards and the Residence cards have lovely illustrations, and every card has beautifully done borders and symbols depicted on them. Most of them also come with some flavour text, which is either dark or humorous or, most commonly, both. Gloom Unhappy Homes has high production values and they have created a wonderful set of cards that are fun to play with. It’s only let down a little by the box it comes in, which is flimsy, awkward and a bad size for storing cards in, as you have to split the deck into two roughly equal piles and slide them in side by side, which feels like a really odd decision when dealing with regular sized cards.
Disclaimer
Gloom Unhappy Homes is the only Gloom expansion I’ve played with so far, so although I know it combines well with the core Gloom set, I really can’t speak to how well it combines with the other expansions.
Tell us your thoughts on Gloom Unhappy Homes by heading over to our Instagram!
