hpr_transcripts/hpr2132.txt

Episode: 2132
Title: HPR2132: Gloom Tabletop Game
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2132/hpr2132.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:42:17

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This is HPR episode 2,132 entitled Bloom Table Top Game.
It is hosted by Klaatu and is about 23 minutes long.
The summary is Klaatu Reviews the Card Game Bloom.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
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Howdy folks, this is 5150.
If you're going to attend the Ohio Linux Fest this weekend, October 7th through 8th,
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That's going to be first come, first serve under the desk.
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And we'd love to meet all our fans in Columbus.
See you there.
You're listening to hacker public radio.
My name is ClotTube.
This is a continuation of my tabletop gaming series.
This episode I want to talk about Gloom GLO-O-N.
Gloom is a card game, it's about family, it's about miserable, miserable families.
This is the game that first got me introduced to one of my favorite games, Dark Colts.
Because everyone was talking about Gloom, when everyone talked about Gloom, they would
tend to refer to Dark Colts.
They would be like, and it has elements of Dark Colts, no idea what that meant at the
time, but that's kind of what introduced me to this older game.
So I figured I'd talk a little bit about Gloom.
In the game, the gameplay is, each player has a fictional family, which I think is about
five cards, four or five cards, five cards.
And you lay your family out face up in front of you.
So everyone sees your family.
And the goal of the game is that each player tries to heap tragedy cards onto their opponents
family members, making them, no I'm sorry, I got that reversed.
You're trying to heap tragedy upon your own family, so you're trying to make your own
family as miserable as possible.
And then you give blessing, you give good fortune to the families of your opponents.
And the player with the gloomiest family wins.
And in fact, it's not just the gloomiest family, it's the player with the gloomiest family,
with the family who dies at their gloomiest.
So you want each of your family members to be just about as worse off as they could
possibly be, like well into the negative scoring, and then you want them to die.
And then at the end of the game, you tally up all of your dead family members, and you see
how miserable they were when they died.
And whose ever family was collectively the gloomiest wins.
It's a really fun, obviously dark humor, kind of a reverent kind of game, but it's actually
totally family-friendly, it's not a bad thing, it's funny, it's funny, you just have to
have a slightly twisted sense of humor, but not super twisted, kids can play this is what
I'm trying to say.
And it's also good for like two players, technically it's from two to four players, it's what
it's designed for, but that's if you play with a full family in front of you.
So if you if you were in a pinch and you had like five or six players, you could just
each have smaller family sets and that would be fine.
So dark sense of humor, the card design is relatively dark, the artwork is done in a
very sort of Edward Gory style, you know, it's like very much like that classic kind
of Victorian sort of dark illustration style.
All the misfortunes are again just kind of very macabre and Victorian, I can't think of
any off the top of my head, but you know, like consumption and driven to drink, you know,
things like that, like it's always sort of very proper and Victorian tragedy.
The cards themselves interestingly are printed on transparent plastic, which is one of
the things that I don't love about the game.
I mean, it's an interesting design choice, but it does make it a little bit more high
tech.
You know, you can't really, it would be less easy to design your own cards, for instance,
because whatever you design would have to be printed on cellophane or whatever this
stuff is, the transparent paper, because it actually matters, because if you put a good
fortune card on someone's family member, then that might occupy one slot of their, you
know, fortune ranking, and the thing under that card, which you can see, because the
card is transparent, either, you know, adds to that misfortune or buffers against that
misfortune.
It doesn't matter that the cards are transparent.
And I guess you could probably hack around that, but yeah, it's designed to be layered
on top of each other.
So it is, I mean, it's a very creative game design that is very, very cool.
And the game mechanic is, as everyone said in all the reviews that I'd read before playing
it.
It is reminiscent of Dark Colts, because the two players involved, at least, you know,
the players involved, are essentially playing the roles of life and death.
You play death and misfortune for your own family and life and good fortune for your opponents.
So I've played the game as both a two and a four player, and I think a three player.
So I've played in practically every, every variety.
And I will say that it is a stronger game with more than two players.
Because with two players, the plot of the game does get pretty repetitive.
It's kind of like, I mean, it's very predictable, you know, if your opponent has a card that
is going to do bad things, then it's obviously going to go on their family.
They have a card that does good things.
It's obviously going on your family because you're the only other game in town.
So I've not tried it with a fake third player.
I guess I could try that at some point, like a ghost player, where you just give this player
a hand and then draw randomly from their deck and then, but I don't know how you would,
how would you then decide who's family gets the result of that random player?
I guess you could incorporate a die roll or something and, you know, compete for who's
going to get the bad or the good card from your random player.
So it is stronger anyway.
Two player is permitted.
It is kind of like it, it comes up when you ask a forum or a group of people, hey, what's
this good two player card game?
Gloom does come up, but I'm saying that it's not necessarily the strongest two player
game that I've ever played.
But the game play itself, I mean, it is a pretty simple game.
The process of understanding how the game is played is really, really simple.
Like you pick it up really, really fast.
And so you've got your negative self-worth is whatever happens when you place negative
cards onto a family member.
And then there's positive self-worth, which is what you do when you, you know, you give
something good to an opposing family.
That's the basics.
But in addition to that, you've got event cards.
And these are sort of spanners that get thrown into the works to kind of shake things up.
And there are some really good ones in there.
Like some event cards will let you swap out, you know, a modifier card, like a positive
self-worth card or a negative self-worth card.
You can remove it from a family member and put it on some other family member or you
can just discard them entirely or maybe you get to draw extra cards or swap out your
hand or steal a card from your opponent's hand.
Things like that.
I mean, there are some really nasty ones in there as well, like there's one card I think
where you make one of the your opponent's family members an imaginary friend by negating,
like basically use zero them out.
So you make them totally zero some, like they're neither positive or negative.
They're just, they completely essentially didn't exist.
And so your opponent now is playing with four family members to your five.
So your chance for success goes up quite a bit.
And I guess in a way that's another thing about the two player game.
It's just kind of like you get one of those types of cards and your opponent is just nearly
obliterated because I mean unless they're playing with a really, really miserable family,
there's just no way they're going to equal, you know, like your cards.
But that's the strategy to the game, I guess, in a two or a four player game is the death
card.
That card in, in gloom is if your opponent has a family member that's particularly, particularly
miserable at any given point, then if your opponent draws a death card, they can play that
death card on, on that family member and that kind of locks that family member in, you
know, like if they're at a negative 30 or negative 40, whatever, a death card preserves
that negative score pretty much completely.
I think there may be an event card that could, that could reverse that or something, but
it's pretty rare.
But that's kind of the goal as you progress through the game is to get a death card, but not
a death card too soon.
You don't want to play the death card if you're, if your family member is just like negative
10, you know, that's nothing.
You want that family member to be super negative, super miserable.
You want to keep compiling, you know, piling negative things onto that player, but of course
your opponent is working against you and trying to make that family member happier so that
at some point, someone's going to kill that family member off, whether it's you or that
opponent, your opponent, they're going to play a death card and that family member's score
and that self worth is going to get locked in and that might be good for you and it might
be bad for you.
So that's, that's the strategy of the game is when, when exactly are you going to play
a death card?
Are you going to surprise your opponent and make their, their, their family member die happy
or are you going to preserve one of your own family members as a totally miserable person?
It just all depends.
The game also attempts at least to sort of harken back to its dark cults heritage by encouraging
its players to spin a yarn as they play.
So the rules specifically say like it's more fun if you, if you give, if you give a backstory
about what happened to the family member and that is a great idea, but I in, in practice
I'm if I have found it very difficult to actually to put into, into play because like each
card, each, each card that you are playing generally has like a little bit of a, you know,
flavor text as they say.
So it sort of says like, you know, ravaged by a pack of rabid rats.
So that's, that's the thing that you're playing on this card that, that, that, that reduces
their self worth.
It makes them more miserable, right?
And it's just kind of hard, I think, to come up with a backstory for that because there's
no context, you know, it's like you've got these sort of generic, generic family members
without a built-in backstory.
And you've got this event that happens to them.
And so it's kind of like, well, what do you do with that?
I don't know.
Bernard was down in the basement looking for mothballs and then he was ravaged by a pack
of rabid rats or Bernard was walking to church on Christmas and was ravaged by a pack
of rabid rats.
You know, it's just, there's no, there's no padding there like, who is Bernard?
Where does he live?
Does he go to church on Christmas?
Does he go to the basement from mothballs?
But who is, you know, like, where is, what's there to build off of?
So I don't think that the storytelling element of the game really works very well.
Maybe if they had some story starter cards, it would help, you know, kind of like, here's
the setup.
This is, this is what your family is up to.
And now every misfortune can kind of be given in that context, maybe, or, or something
like that.
I don't know.
They would definitely have to have more to the game in order to encourage, I think, effective
storytelling.
Maybe you could come up with a rule, like a modded rule where you say, like, you know,
before we start the actual gameplay, we have to introduce our families and, and give
each one a backstory.
And then as we play the game, we have to, you know, every, every, everything that happens
has to have a story attached to it.
But I don't feel like the game builds that into the gameplay.
You know, it's, I feel like that would make the game more awkward to play because it's
very much a straight game, you know, you draw cards, you put down cards, and it's, it's
very sort of like you're playing the numbers.
The fact that they're family members and they have self-worth and, like, names and things
like that, that doesn't really matter.
Like you're playing the numbers, you're, you're just trying to, to make your opponent have
more numbers than you, and they're trying to make sure that you have more numbers than
them.
And that's, that's the game, ultimately.
So I, I don't feel like the game really is a storytelling game in the way that it, that
it really, that it, that it kind of claims in its own rule book that it, that it can be.
That's okay.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing.
I'm just saying, when you're reading the rules and it tells you, remember, try to tell
a story.
It's just kind of like, yeah, nice idea, but you didn't really remember to incorporate
that into the actual game, so it doesn't really work.
If you try to, um, do a sort of character driven game, I think that, um, it's difficult
when those characters have no impact on the game.
Like what I'm trying to say is that the, the game itself gives you, it gives you these
family members, and they each have, you know, their characters and they have names and, and
they have little clever little back stories that are given in like a sentence.
Um, but no, that actually matters, you know, like the, the, the family doesn't really,
like one family isn't any better or different than another really, like it could be any,
any set of cards could have been your family members.
It doesn't actually matter.
And that's, that's a difficult thing, I think, for the game as well.
Like when I've been playing it, it's, it's not like my, like one of my family members
is not more, but more, um, more affected by, uh, drinking problems, uh, and another one
might be more affected by physical ailments and another one is more or less affected
by animal attacks, you know, it's like, there's no kind of variation there.
Every single card in the deck is going to affect every single player, every single family
member the same way.
So there's no variation there either.
And I think that might be an interesting thing for, for gloom to have explored and maybe,
uh, potential for a user modified, uh, version there is like for the, the actual family members
that kind of have maybe powers, um, or, or, or propensities towards something, you know,
or resistance towards something that might be an interesting mechanic.
But it doesn't exist.
That's not, it's not something that the game incorporates at all.
So, um, yeah, skill levels could be interesting for, for family members, um, playing with fewer
death cards can sometimes be interesting.
So death cards, as I say, they lock in the current state of your family member.
So if you're playing and you've, you've, you've gotten a family member down to like negative
50 or something, immediately you're going to try to play a death card.
That's well within your interest is to kill that family member off so that they go to the
grave with negative score.
And by contrast, your opponent is going to try to boost your family member to something
positive, you know, positive 35, positive, whatever, um, so that that's affecting, you know,
that's, that's going against what you're trying to do, um, and then they'll want to kill
that family member off with the death card because that's within their interest.
So death cards are very powerful things and by default, the game comes with some number
of death cards.
I don't really remember how many I want to say 20, but that's an arbitrary number since
we don't know how many cards are in the deck.
But it comes with some number of death cards.
So removing some death cards from play, uh, may or may not make the game a little bit
more interesting.
I mean, it might just make it longer, um, but it may make it a little bit more competitive
because now you don't have as many opportunities to lock in characters at certain, certain
places.
Um, yeah, that's kind of interesting.
I think another interesting, um, mechanic would to explore, I haven't tried it is to make
possibly more like, like again, with the family members, like maybe make some family member
more valuable than another, although I don't know, I mean, if that would really work
either.
But like in my mind, I'm thinking, what if the mother, the matron of the family was more
important than the others and if she dies, then then they become, I don't know, immune
to positive modifiers for one round or, you know, something like that or if a, if a pet
dies, then, then their owner, um, I don't know, goes down, you know, gets a, gets an automatic
negative applied to them or something like that, something to kind of make certain consequences
different depending on, you know, what happens.
And that would make the opponent, for instance, kind of have to figure, well, do I want
to, for instance, uh, do I really want to kill that, the matron right now?
Because if I do, then the rest of the family is not going to be able to be affected for
a little while or, you know, do I really want to kill that pet right now?
Because if I do, then that's going to give a boost to their, to their owner and so on.
Um, and again, I haven't tried that and that's, it would be something that would be interesting
to kind of maybe think about or maybe it wouldn't fit into gloom at all.
So maybe there's like some potential for a spin off there.
I'm not sure.
But either way, um, the overall thing I'm trying to get to here is that gloom is a fun, fun
game.
It's dark since a humor, uh, it's, it's a solid game for two players.
It's a better game for more, um, it's good sort of backstabbing fun, you know, it, it
pits you against your, your opponent, um, but in a funny and kind of, uh, funny way because
technically they're not playing against you.
They're giving you nice things, you know, so it's, it's, it's a fun, it's a fun
thing.
It's a fun game.
Um, I wouldn't say it was a perfect game, but it is a fun game and, uh, it's very simple
like in terms of what you have to carry around with you, it comes in a very small box.
It's maybe a hundred cards or so.
It's, um, it's, it's not a whole lot, you know, it's not a big, um, uh, investment, let's
say it's, you know, you can just kind of, you can grab it, throw it in your backpack
and go and now you've got a game on you to play, uh, with a group of friends or whatever.
So it's a, it's a simple little investment, there's probably expansion packs and stuff
like that.
I don't really know.
But, um, it's, it's a fun game.
You should check it out if you have a chance to, if you, if you see it anywhere, uh, for
cheap or whatever, pick it up and, and try it out, it's a lot of fun.
It could be funner.
You might come up with some interesting mods for it.
Um, but overall, yeah, I, I don't have anything bad to say about it.
Just as a two-player game, I think it could be, it could be tweaked for two players, um,
but yeah, give it a go.
It's, it's, it's a fun game.
It's fun.
Really.
Uh, and that's gloom.
G-L-O-O-M.
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