Since Gloom has had my interest reignited in it in the past week or so I was pleasantly surprised and delighted to find out there is a digital version of the game.

I don’t know why I was surprised at all.

These days it would have been more surprising if there were no app version of the game.

But still I was.

So I parted with the pennies, all £5.99 to download it. Another £2.49 of them would get me the Unhappy Homes expansion as an in app purchase. Which I didn’t part with until I had at least decided if I liked the app.

Naturally the app version uses the same art style and art of the physical game. I personally do like the art.

I love the music for the game, it kind of has that Danny Elfman Batman Returns feel to it. It’s suitably atmospheric. There are also little sound bites for each of the family members to try and give them a bit of character.

The BIG surprise for me is this is a solo game where you play against up to three AI bots. Which you can’t even change the difficulty level of. Multiplayer and/or pass and play (standard features in other digital adaptations of board games) should have been included. But are sadly missing.

Speed of play is a little bit of an issue for me. There is no way to speed up the AI turns (something you’d expect should be there from the start). This digital version isn’t going to be one of those games you turn to when you find you have five minutes to fill.

I did find it nearly unplayable on my iPhone. The cards are just too small and unreadable. This is much better on an iPad.

Personally I think some sort of card zoom feature similar to that in Epic the Card Game could have been used.

Naturally playing against the AI looses something from the physical game. The storytelling element. Even with online play against others this would be missing without some sort of voice chat. But that’d never be implemented in app. You’d have to use a third party service like discord or zoom to get the voice side of things. Without the storytelling Gloom is reduced to “just” a card game.

Overall this app version of Gloom has an alpha/beta release feel to it. It’s missing what I’d consider to be core functionality that you’d expect to be there.