Gloom

Players 2 – 5         Ages 13+           60mins

 

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!

Each of the three expansions for Gloom adds one more player, thus with all three expansions, this should be playable with seven players.

Ghost Stories

Players 1 – 4          Ages 12+          60mins

Ghost Stories is a cooperative game in which the players protect the village from incarnations of the lord of hell – Wu-Feng – and his legions of ghosts before they haunt a town and recover the ashes that will allow him to return to life. Each Player represents a Taoist monk working together with the others to fight off waves of ghosts.

The players, using teamwork, will have to exorcise the ghosts that appear during the course of the game. At the beginning of his turn, a player brings a ghost into play and places it on a free spot, and more than one can come in at the same time. The ghosts all have abilities of their own – some affecting the Taoists and their powers, some causing the active player to roll the curse die for a random effect, and others haunting the villager tiles and blocking that tile’s special action. On his turn, a Taoist can move on a tile in order to exorcise adjacent ghosts or to benefit from the villager living on the tile, providing it is not haunted. Each tile of the village allows the players to benefit from a different bonus. With the cemetery, for example, Taoists can bring a dead Taoist back to life, while the herbalist allows to recover spent Tao tokens, etc. It will also be possible to get traps or move ghosts or un-haunt other village tiles.

To exorcise a ghost, the Taoist rolls three Tao dice with different colors: red, blue, green, yellow, black, and white. If the result of the roll matches the color(s) of the ghost or incarnation of Wu-Feng, the exorcism succeeds. The white result is a wild color that can be used as any color. For example, to exorcise a green ghost with 3 resistance, you need to roll three green, three white, or a combination of both. If your die rolls fall short, you can also use Tao tokens that match the color in addition to your roll. You may choose to use these after your roll. Taoists gain these tokens by using certain village tiles or by exorcising certain ghosts. One of the Taoists has a power that allows him to receive such a token once per turn.

To win, the players must defeat the incarnation of Wu-Feng, a boss who arrives at the end of the game. There are also harder difficulty levels that add more incarnations of Wu-Feng, in which to win, you must defeat all of them.

There are many more ways to lose, however. The players lose if three of the village’s tiles are haunted, if the draw pile is emptied while the incarnation of Wu-Feng is still in play, or if all the priests are dead.

“This is the toughest cooperative game I’ve ever played” – Darwin

Ghost Stories : White Moon

Players 1 – 4          Ages 12+          90mins

With the Ghost Stories: White Moon expansion, the monks have an extra task to deal with: rescuing the villagers themselves from the ghosts.

During setup, three villagers tokens are placed on all village tiles but one. The Moon Portal is placed on the remaining tile (the center tile for normal difficulty, on the side for harder difficulty, in a corner for masochistic players). Villagers can follow monks when they move. To rescue a villager, you have to bring him to the Moon Portal and take a special rescue action on that tile.

Villagers come in families of 1, 2 or 3 members. When an entire family is rescued, you get the family’s reward. Small families give small rewards (like an extra Qi, or an artifact that can move the other monks to your tile), large families give large rewards (like a sword that lets you turn one die to white during each exorcism, or an armor that cancels the ghosts’ come-into-play effects).

Unfortunately, some ghosts are able to kill villagers. Each time a villager gets killed, the players suffer the family’s curse (which can go from annoying -like having a tao token removed from the game, to downright brutal, like having a extra Wu-Feng incarnation come into play). Villagers also die if their tile is haunted. Haunters also force villagers to flee (villagers that cannot flee are killed).

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