What do you want out of life? To be happy? Well that's just boring!
Do you think good things are better than bad things? You’re wrong again!
In Gloom, the more miserable you are the better things are going for you, and the very worst thing you can do for your friends is to bring them joy.

Each player controls the fate of an eccentric family of misfits. Your goal is sad, but simple: make your family suffer the greatest tragedies possible before allowing them to pass on to the well-deserved respite of death.
Ask penguins to poison them, make them starve in a storm or get written out of the will… The more miserable they are, the better!
That’s not all, if you want to win, you’ll have to make your rival’s family as happy and annoyingly alive as you can: delighted by ducklings, having picnics in the park, finding love at the lake… These are some of the worst things that could happen to them!

HOW TO MAKE EVERYONE SUFFER?

From 1 to 4 players. Each player gets two moves per turn.

• Play modifier cards on top of character cards, describing the horrible mishaps you inflict on your own characters to lower their Self-Worth scores, while trying to cheer up your opponents’ characters with happy occasions that pile on positive points.
• Event cards will give you other chances to alter fates: draw cards on stormy nights, give a character a second chance in life or mess with another one by discarding its top modifier card… What a twist of fate!
• Finally, kill your family or your rival’s family by using the Untimely Death cards! Baked into a pie, eaten by bears or just dying old and alone… There are so many ways to die.

When the last character in any family dies, the game ends. The player with the lowest Family Value wins the game!
Who will be devoured by weasels and who will be wondrously well wed? Find out in Gloom…

MATURE CONTENT DESCRIPTION

The developers describe the content like this:

Be forewarned; Gloom is a card game which features no visible violence or nudity. However the core mechanic of the game is to make your characters as miserable as possible. This means that a large number of cards will feature text describing terrible scenes or events that characters will/have experienced that may be upsetting to some.