2-5 players 
30 min

Gloom! Card Game 2nd Edition

The world of Gloom is a sad and benighted place. The sky is gray, the tea is cold, and a new tragedy lies around every corner. Debt, disease, heartache, and packs of rabid flesh-eating mice—just when it seems like things can't get any worse, they do. But some say that one's reward in the afterlife is based on the misery endured in life. If so, there may yet be hope—if not in this world, then in the peace that lies beyond.

In the Gloom card game, you assume control of the fate of an eccentric family of misfits and misanthropes. The goal of the game is sad, but simple: you want your characters to suffer the greatest tragedies possible before passing on to the well-deserved respite of death. You'll play horrible mishaps like Pursued by Poodles or Mocked by Midgets on your own characters to lower their Self-Worth scores, while trying to cheer your opponents' characters with marriages and other happy occasions that pile on positive points. The player with the lowest total Family Value wins.

Printed on transparent plastic cards, Gloom features an innovative design by noted RPG author Keith Baker. Multiple modifier cards can be played on top of the same character card; since the cards are transparent, elements from previously played modifier cards either show through or are obscured by those played above them. You'll immediately and easily know the worth of every character, no matter how many modifiers they have. You've got to see (through) this game to believe it!

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Unwelcome Guest Expansion for Gloom Card Game 2nd Edition

The Gloom: Unwelcome Guests expansion adds one player and 55 cards to the game. Here is a description of the expansion from the publisher:

In the Gloom card game, you make your eccentric family of misfits suffer the greatest tragedies possible before helping them pass on to the well-deserved respite of death. Just mix the 55 transparent cards in this new set together with your copy of Gloom to add morbid new Modifiers, Events, and Untimely Deaths, and a new family - the malodorous Malone mob - including The Broken Arms Hotel as a Residence card to use with the Unhappy Homes expansion. When Boils Malone brought his family overseas to “get away from the heat,” he wasn’t expecting quite so much rain!

Adding an extra level of strategy, new persistent effect icons on cards allow their special effects to continue to be active even if covered by another card. A persistent effect ends only when the attached character is killed.

Also inside are five Unwelcome Guest cards. Deal one or more face up to the table’s center at the start of the game. Guests “follow” the card types noted on them; no matter where it currently is, a living Guest immediately moves to join the family of the character on which one of its “trigger” cards is played. All its Modifiers are moved with it, and it’s considered a member of that family until it moves again. This may delay the game’s end if a final play draws a Guest to the near-winner’s family.

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Fairytale Gloom Card Game

Fairytale Gloom spreads that misery and suffering to the beloved, classic stories of your youth, like a magical, flying godmother ready to perturb you with peas, foil you with fairies, and surprise you with spiders.

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Gloom in Space Card Game

Space is the worst — empty, black, airless, awash in radiation, and dotted with immense clods of flaming plasma that make everything within millions of miles too hot to support life. If your living room were like space, you'd never ever go there.

In Gloom in Space, you make your rag-tag band or star-faring heroes miserable, then kill them. Sci-fi archetypes like the Smuggler, Captain, Doctor, and Dark Lord fight their fathers, meddle with monoliths, get caught in compactors, and wind up getting nuked from orbit. Eventually, enough Untimely Deaths come to pass that the game ends. And then? The most miserable crew wins.

Gloom in Space is a standalone game that's also compatible with all existing Gloom core games and expansions.

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Cthulhu Gloom card Game 

From Dunwich to Innsmouth, from the halls of Miskatonic University to the Charles Dexter Ward at Arkham Asylum, trouble is in the air. The stars are almost right, and terrors from beyond space and time are beginning to break through. When Cthulhu rises, we're all doomed – but whose downfall will be the most entertaining?

Cthulhu Gloom takes the game play of Atlas' Gloom and puts a Lovecraftian spin on it. Each player controls a group of protagonists, and your goal is to make them as miserable and insane as possible – preferably with them dying quickly while your opponents' heroes remain sane and (at a minimum) alive. In the publisher's description: "While your characters Gibber With Ghouls and Learn Loathsome Lore to earn negative points, you'll encourage your opponents to be Analyzed by Alienists and to Just Forget About the Fungus to pile on positive points. When one group finally falls prey to the interdimensional doom that awaits us all, the player whose characters have suffered the most wins."

As in Gloom, the cards in Cthulhu Gloom are transparent, allowing you to stack multiple modifier cards on a character card to alter its stats or undo what an opponent has done to you. While Cthulhu Gloom can be played on its own or combined with Gloom and its many expansions, it does introduce two new types of cards:

• Story cards can be in play from the start of the game, and the first player to meet a Story card's conditions – e.g., drawing the attention of The King in Yellow or heeding The Call of Cthulhu – claims the card and gains its benefits (or drawbacks).

• Transformation cards mutate a character for the remainder of the game, no matter which modifiers might come its way later. What's more, the character's image is replaced with "something hideous and slimy". You'd expect no less really...

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