In January this year, Atlas Games released a little card game called Gloom – “The Game of Inauspicious Incidents and Grave Consequences.”

What is not to love about a game in which the primary goal is to kill off your family in the most tragic way possible. Especially when it’s with cards like “Pestered By Poodles” or “Delighted By Ducklings”…

The game’s setting and design oozes Edward Gorey from every pore. If that’s not your style, then the game probably isn’t for you. But then, you probably didn’t read this far anyway. Which is a shame. Because while the setting makes Gloom entertaining, it’s the mechanics that make it interesting.

For starters, the turn design demonstrates a mature understanding of common card games, as well as where they fail. Specifically, you may only kill a family member at the beginning of your turn. This essentially means that you can’t drop a really powerful modifier on a character and then immediately kill them before anyone can try to do something about it.

The cards are printed on clear acrylic. The cards are designed such that as you play them on the characters, you stack the cards, sometimes obscuring (and thus overriding) elements of cards already played. This is really the payoff for the game, though it is not without its flaws. It’s an interesting mechanic in an area traditionally overstuffed with games trying to find creative ways to tell the player to turn the card 90 degrees.

As mentioned, though, the acrylic cards have their flaws. Sometimes the cards can be difficult to read. This is especially true where red ink was used on a black background. Most of the time, this text is flavor text only, but it still makes for difficult reading. Additionally, the cards show fingerprints very easily. And because the cards are transparent, you can generally tell if a person is drawing a modifier or not, and if it is positive or negative. I consider this less of an actual problem than an interesting quirk to the game – you can generally guess what type of cards a person may have, which can allow you to adjust your strategy. But the door swings both way.

The biggest problem with the acrylic cards seems to be a minor flaw in the way some of them were put together. To prevent damage to the paint used to print the cards, it appears that the cards were printed on a piece of acrylic, and then laminated. In some cases, the laminate used shows some imperfections – tiny spots where the laminate did not seal to the card, or maybe a place where the card was scratched before being laminated. I have seen it across a few different copies of the game. It’s never so bad that the card cannot be read, but it does tend to detract from the beauty of the game. Hopefully this is a design problem that can be solved in future printings.

Speaking of, if you think you want a copy, and your Friendly Local Game Store has one copy left, you’d better snag it. From what I’ve seen locally, it’s very popular and selling very well.

Overall, I love this game. I’m looking forward to expansions already, because I want to know what the Duck means. If I wear out my deck, I’ll just pick up another. Gloom plays well. It’s the light and fun way to die.

I give Gloom a rating of “Lemur”