July 31, 2016: Crowdfunding Focus - Gloom: Digital Edition

Guess what? You can pay money to kill weird people. 

Because in Gloom, the families are weird, your goal is to kill them horribly, and now you can fund the digital version of the game on Kickstarter! 

Remember Gloom? It's the 2005 card game, designed by Keith Baker and published by Atlas Games, where you strive to make the lives of your family members more miserable than the lives of your opponents' family members, before killing them off one by one. Play cards representing tragedy (like "Mocked by Midgets") on your own family members; play cards with happy events like weddings on your opponents' families. We even collaborated with Atlas for their version of Munchkin Gloom. You can say we are fans. 

Sky Ship Studios is trying to raise $75,000 on Kickstarter to bring all that beautiful unhappiness to a video game – Gloom: Digital Edition. That's the subject of today's Crowdfunding Focus, an occasional series where we tell you about cool and nerdy things you can fund on the internet.

The digital game will have the same great, sad art style as the card game, with plenty more content. And since half the fun of Gloom has always been making up sad stories for your families by tying together all the terrible cards you play on them, Gloom: Digital Edition will feature animated characters that talk and tell the players their own tales of woe.

Pledge $10 or more and get the game. And if you like this idea, you really should fund it – it's got just under $32,000 at the time of this post's writing, and under a month to go in the campaign.

I'll let the Kickstarter write-up take us out: "Exploding with character and style, the denizens of Gloom are simply begging to be brought to life (so you can kill them)!" Oblige them with your kindly given cash.

-- Ariel Barkhurst