Crazy Creatures of Dr. Gloom - Tips & Strategies

In Crazy Creatures of Dr. Gloom playing a card that matches the card beneath it gives you the choice of either flipping one of the 4 creature incubator machines between its “+” and “-” side or forcing an opponent of your choice to draw a card. Flipping the machine will dictate whether the next card played in that machine’s stack must be lower or higher than the proceeding card, while adding a card to an opponent’s hand – in a game where victory is determined by running out of cards first – is always tempting.

As counter-intuitive as it may feel when you’ve got a handful of playable cards, I always choose to flip the machines early in the game. This serves two purposes:

– First, it gives you greater flexibility to remove the punitive 2-penalty-point cards (3s and 4s) from your hand early in the game, reducing the overall cost of a loss to you (I don’t imagine many people play Crazy Creatures just once – it’s a short game designed to be played multiple times while accumulating scores over several games).

– Second, it should make you less of a target for other players. They’ll always be motivated to penalize the person that penalized them, and you can let them attack each other while playing friendly.

If your hand is loaded with 1s and 6s (which have no penalty points and are easiest to play) when your hand size hits 5 or so, you’ll be in a great position to either play out first or suffer little to no penalty. At this point you can switch to forcing draws on anybody who may have hit you earlier in the game.

One thing to be mindful of when you’re getting your high point cards out of your hand early is not losing diversification. If your final 4 or 5 cards are of only 2 colors they could be difficult to play and cause you to skip turns. If you’re short on yellow to start the game, you probably want to hold onto them until late in the game even if they’re punitive 3s or 4s. While it’s nice to have no 2-penalty cards in your hand, it’s much worse if you can’t play on 2 of the 4 decks over your last several turns.