Gloom in Space

About this board game

Gloom in Space is a darkly comic sci-fi card game for 2–5 players, with games lasting about 60 minutes. You lead a rag-tag band of star-faring heroes through a universe where misery is the route to victory.

In this standalone game, players make their own characters miserable, then kill them. The setting embraces a bleak vision of space: empty, black, airless, and awash in radiation, with immense clods of flaming plasma making everything within millions of miles too hot to support life.

Your crew is made up of familiar science-fiction archetypes, each ready to encounter an appropriately unfortunate fate. They might fight their fathers, meddle with monoliths, get caught in compactors, or wind up nuked from orbit.

• Play as archetypes such as the Smuggler, Captain, Doctor, and Dark Lord.
• Build misery around your heroes before their Untimely Deaths arrive.
• Compete to have the most miserable crew when the game ends.

The game ends after enough Untimely Deaths have come to pass. At that point, victory goes not to the crew that survived, but to the one that endured the greatest misery.

Released in 2017, Gloom in Space works as a complete standalone game. It is also compatible with all existing Gloom core games and expansions, offering a way to bring its spacefaring misfortune into the wider Gloom collection.