Tag: Board Game

Welcome to the second ever installment of Pinkie’s Who Would Win. It has been a while since the first episode so let me explain what makes this different from other versus simulators like Death Battle… well first and foremost. There is NO Death Battle. All competitors play a simple versus board- or video game against each other.

Today we pit two of the greatest crazy woman ever against each other! I would marry them both.. if they weren’t dead! In the Blue Corner we have THE Yandere, the YUUUKI-KUN of YouTube Memes! Winner of the Universe 1 survival game! Yuno Gasai! And in the Red corner the MASTERMIND of Danganronpa, the queen of killer teddy bears herself. The Ultimate Despair! Junko Enshima! Now Let’s get ready to NONE VIOLENTLY RUMBLE! With a board game called gloom!

The Challenge

Gloom is a storytelling game centered around up to four eccentric families. Each player takes control of a weird, twisted victorian type family, such as a failing circus, a sinning rich family and a bunch of weird scientists.. who put their brains in a box or animate their teddy bears. It’s been around since 2004 and in 2005 was elected the best traditional card game of the year. It’s art style is based on the old classic picture books, from the olden days. The artwork is absolutely amazing though sparingly present. It’s a game set in victorian times and features a bit of “traditional” english which can make some words a bit tricky for non native english speakers. Yet underneath lies a game that is truly amazing.

The goal in Gloom is to make sure your own family has as much negative self worth as possible, one can finalise a negative score by killing off characters with untimely death cards. When the first family has died out the scores will be tallied up and the family who was the most miserable at THAT time, regardless if they have any living members wins. So it’s a game about murdering your family and close ones and causing despair.. jeesz.. I wonder why I picked Yuno and Junko again?!

Each player in Gloom has two actions per turn and always has give cards in hand, unaltered. However Gloom works in harsh ways.. there more miserable you make your family the more miserable play will get for you as well. If you play a card worth lots of negative self worth .. you have to decrease your hand size, or discard all your cards and NOT draw any new cards next turn, while positive cards can increase your hand size or even give you an extra turn.  So there is tactics involved in this game.  You can also force another player to give up their hand because you can play misery over ANY character that is living in the game. Deaths can only be played as your first action never as your second and only miserable characters can die.  

Each card describes an event of misfortune both players tell a joined narrative of a town housing these families and as a card is played you explain what happens to  your characters. For example the Dark’s Den of Deformities has a clown named Giggles. You can play the card “Mauled by Manatees” on him by telling “It was a gloomy sunday morning that Giggles dropped his favorite honking horn of the cliff and when he finally made the hike there.. he saw a large animal sitting near his horn. Bravely he fought that day until the beach coloured red with his blood as he was mauled by the manatees. The card’s effect than kick in and you become a bit more miserable yourself. There are also some event cards that really tell you how to play them itself.. but now that you know how to play the game let’s start our versus.

The Set-Up 

Our game would begin with Junko forcing herself to pick first. Yuno would allow this as she is still pretending to be rather friendly at this time smiling, looking forward to play a game. Junko would choose the red cards. Castle Slogar is the family name.  This family is all about weird experiments. Junko knows a thing or two about weird experiments, but the real reason she chooses it is because it has a card named Grogar. A animated Teddy bear who was made by Lady Slogar from the brain of a dead person to create the perfect groom for the daughter character. The daughters character flavor text reads, It’s a shame when a child dies at such a tender age, however in some cases it is a shame if it doesn’t . The Teddy bear and little girl relation really appeal to her I would say.

Yuno would then choose the purple family. Hemlock Hall. This is a family run by Lord Wellington-Smyte a man who looks nothing like his two children, nothing at all , however after his wife passed he become absolute fond of his children. A loving father is something Yuno would really desire. The family has also a set of twins that are possessed by demons. Yuno remembers she had a twin…sort of…once.. and she kinda met demons that made her do these things.  So it seems like a great fit. Yuno also sees the butler.. tagline, no matter what happened he did it! She rubs her hands as she already has a perfect scapegoat.

Next the order of play is determined. In Gloom the player who had the most horrible day up today, can start the game. Now this would mean that almost 100% of the time Yuno would take the first turn. Junko likes feeling despair, it is her favorite emotion, so if she had a bad day she would tell it very happily, if she had a good day she would be very bored but in this case I believe she would never win  the first turn because of her personality. Besides that, talking to your parents severed heads to tell them about how your day was and how that boy you like might sorta.. but not really like you back a bit seems more miserable than pretending to be a Teddy Bear. 

The First Half

Yuno comes out aggressively, we have seen her flip the switch several times, as soon as the chances opens up her behaviour can alter dramatically in mere moments. She would play some Misery onto Junko first. To cripple her as soon as possible so she could finish her off when at her own convenience.  Despair scores come in three slots, Upper middle and lower, and each card.. at the end is  the entire score that is visible counts. (Cards are translucent otherwise.) So for example if you play a card with -20 on a upper slot and a -10 on the lower slot, followed by a card that deals -30 to the lower slot.. that character now is worth -50, while only taking the effect of the last card played (if permanent some effects are upon play only). Yuno would force Junko to give up her entire hand, while punishing her own Nanny with a hand penalty.  Junko has to skip a turn and Yuno follows up by sealing Junko’s draw for the next turn by causing even more misery to her family. Both girls laugh as Junko is kept in a stunlock.

In Gloom you fill up your hand to the maximum of your hand size at the end of each turn, so disallowing Junko from play allowed Yuno to set up a solid base for her own field. However by doing so she has put Junko at the score lead.. she will fix that later on she thinks playing the long con. While both girls are capable of such thoughts Yuno is more level headed when it comes to accounting for the actions of another. Throughout the first half of this game, resources are still plenty, allowing her to go in aggressively. Since cards are translucent and event and untimely death cards have a symbol in the middle you can tell who is holding one of those more powerful cards and who isn’t. Yuno would attempt to gather deaths as quickly as possible lowering the chances for Junko to draw them.

Eventually Junko would get her turn though. She would have a very different playstyle as Yuno. Mostly inflicting despair upon herself. Happiness cards, she would never play even not on her opponent. She refuses to play them, turning any happy card in her hand into a dead card. She would notice this and adapt her strategy to clear her and and the board of any happiness. This strategy while giving out a lot of points, means Yunko skips a lot of turns or has to burn her hand through other means oftenly, so while she has bigger gains her playstyle is a lot more crippled than Yuno’s resulting in a tie around the halfway point.

Yuno’s stories mostly feature a young dashing rougish man named Yuki who loves is princess who has commanded him to do these certain tasks, which usually trigger the misery for the family. She identifies as one of the twin characters saying the young boy is very in love with the oldest one. Almost as if she is telling a tale of love.. set in a world where everything just falls apart. Junko’s story telling is much more vicious, when a character is “stung by bees” she would prefer to tell  the victim was stung in the eyeball and it swelled up so much that it popped out. Even things as food poisoning she tries to give permanent and dreadful consequences. Like when she gives Yuno’s maid food poisoning, lowering her negative score, she still tells a tale on how te Nanny due to her food poisoning was to slow to stop the little transgender kid from being beaten to death by a bully called Mondo. 

The Second Half

An average game last for about 45 minutes. Yuno has the strategic advantage and if play continues as is er way of dealing with things will definitely give her the victory.  She makes Junko just makes herself so miserable that her hand size is so small that she can barely take any turns. She also doesn’t have any untimely death cards in her hand because of how much she decreases her own hand size. Now all Yuno has to do is play a card to lower that score of her opponent and kill of her family. The first target she strikes happens to be the bear. She notices how Yunko favors it and wants to take it out of the equation to unbalance her  opponent. 

Junko blinks as suddenly her eyes go all swirly and her tongue goes snakelike. You do not mess with her beloved toy. She is out for revenge. As soon as she gets her first death card she immediately goes for Yuno’s father figure. While Miss Enoshima clearly is more deranged and even less lucid than Miss Gassai she is a better judge of character. She has studied characters of all sorts of dispositions, especially the larger than life ones with aggravated aspects, such as Yuno.  The Ultimate Fashionista is a much better judge of character than her opponent, who usually just deludes people into being treats and much sees characters much more one dimensionally. Junko is all about pressing where it hurts. While the 78th class member functions well when pressured her opponent who one the universe 1 survival game comes apart at the seams when facing these kind of things.

Yuno’s storytelling turns much more vicious as she remorselessly goes to hunt down every member of Junko’s family. Making them miserable and killing them off. No one hurts her father but herself. When the smoke clears .. Yuno has made herself lose the game. Her delusions pushing her into a blind rage. Junko thoroughly enjoying the ride she was on, in the end was much more able to keep her mindset stable. She likes despair either way the game goes, Monokumas have been destroyed before. The character is so insane she doesn’t break down she relishes the pain both as a giver and a receiver. Yuno was never good at dealing with pain herself. Which ends up costing her the game.

The Winner: Junko Enoshima

When the game is over Yuno realises it was just a game and normalises again. Given that Gloom is a storytelling game that lasts fairly long if you play it with any tactics , you get to know your opponent quite a bit during a game, which Junko could take use off.  After the game Yuno ends up crying for the loss off her new father.. Junko then does something she normally doesn’t she steps up to the girl and comforts her.

“I got an idea, I happen to know a lot of parents who lost their children, how about we let them participate in a death game, the winners get to live and adopt you as their daughter.. that way they will approve of the true you”. Yuno stops crying. “They would not be my real parents” Junko thinks and smiles. “I saw you carrying those heads.. we could sew the faces on the winners than they would be your real parents” The two girls look at each other with nothing but madness in their eyes as we zoom out.

The final shot would be that of a table of Gloom like cards. But there other face depicted on them. A few untimely death cards would rest on Danganronpa character like Sakura, Chihiro and Leon.  A monitor shows a silhouette of a man put a gun against another man’s head. As the trigger is pulled a female hand puts an untimely death card on a greyed man named Takaaki Ishimaru, there are a fair bit of misery points on the man. “You are not going to win this time” a girly voice says. Some screams on the monitors cut trough two girls sitting at a table giggling.

In the end since Gloom is a fairly lengthy game, in my opinion would Junko gains the upper hand in the final part. Where Yuno is much more sane and strategical she would dominate the game.. but once she loses control.. everything has to suffer and die.. and that is not best mindset to play this game. Yuno would create delusions for herself and since we tell stories about these, Junko will be able to exploit these and bring out unstable Yuno, but that is just my opinion!

Have you played Gloom? Who do you think would win? Let me know and if you visit this blog without being subscribed please do! I am very close to my next mile stone! Thank you and see you next time! Love you you all!