Does your family love dark, morbid humor and amazing alliterations? Then Gloom is the game for you!

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Up to five players can play Gloom.  Each player gets a family of four.  All of the cards are printed on transparent plastic, so when you play a card, you stack it on top of one of the characters, and can still see bits of the cards underneath it.

There are four different families; in a four-player game, each person discards one of their family members. If there is a fifth person playing, they get the discards to create a mismatched family.

The goal is to end with the lowest score.  There are modifier cards, that modify a character’s score – good things (like living happily ever after) add points to a character’s score, while bad things (like getting mauled by a manatee) subtract points.  You place negative modifiers on your characters and positive cards on your opponents’ characters.

There are also event cards.  Event cards can allow you to remove one or all modifier cards from someone’s character card (either yours or someone else’s), get extra cards, look for cards in the discard pile, remove a character from a game, etc.

Untimely death cards mostly just lock in your character’s (hopefully) low score.  You can only play an untimely death card on a character with a negative score, but if an opponent has a barely negative score it can be a good strategy to kill one of their characters off.

Perhaps my favorite card is “Died without a care.”  This eliminates any negative modifiers from a character, killing them at zero points.  For a game where you’re trying to get the lowest score, this card is brutal, and I love playing it on my husband’s characters.  No mercy among loved ones!

Some of the untimely death cards give you extra negative points if certain symbols are matched, which can be a good strategy.

Most of the flavor text of the cards is alliterative.  “Was pierced by porcupines.  Sometimes having too many points can be a dangerous thing.” – Removes 15 points from a character’s card.  “Was terrified of topiary.  For generations, we’ve cut down trees at Christmas time.  Now it’s payback time.” – Removes 20 points, while “Was wondrously well wed” adds 20 points.