Gloomier: A Night at Hemlock Hall

About this board game

Gloomier: A Night at Hemlock Hall is a competitive storytelling card game for 2–5 players, with games lasting about 60 minutes. Set at Hemlock Hall, it casts players as authors of unfortunate family tales rather than as dashing detectives.

Your goal is to create the most tragic story while keeping your opponents’ characters healthy and alive. The game ends when an entire family has been killed off, and the family with the most misery wins.

Gloomier uses transparent cards to let each character’s story—and score—change as cards are stacked on top of them. Only the information currently visible through the stack counts, so every new card can reshape the tale and its outcome.

• Modifier cards introduce terrible happenings and give characters negative points.
• Untimely death cards bring a character’s depressing story to an end.
• Stories may involve being detained in the dungeons or poisoned while pruning.

The result is a contest of carefully managed misery: make your own family’s fate as bleak as possible while ensuring rival characters survive long enough to complicate their scores. The transparent-card system keeps the current story state visible as the family’s misfortunes develop.

No prior experience is required to play Gloomier. Players familiar with Gloom can also use its six new stories and fourteen new guests with any edition of Gloom, adding Hemlock Hall’s delightful misery to those games.