My Responsibilities
- Game Design
- Prototyping
- Rulebook Writing
- Content Generation
- File Preparation
- Crowdfunding Design
- Manufacturing Management
- Fulfillment Coordination
Description
Mediums race to figure out a secret object that their teammate—a Spirit—is trying to communicate. Take turns asking your Spirits questions about the object. But there’s a catch—Spirits only write the first few letters of each answer on the pad. Figure out the answers to the questions, and guess the secret object before the other team to win!
Awards and Recognition
Launched in over 13 countries. It has won numerous awards, including earning a Recommendation from the prestigious Spiel Des Jahres, being nominated for the Golden Geek for Best Party Game in 2023, and breaking into the top 50 ranked party games on Board Game Geek.
Design Story
Modern party games have to walk a challenging tightrope. They have to be simple and approachable for new players and nongamers to learn. They have to provide a “micro” puzzle for players to solve each turn, and a “macro” puzzle for players to solve over the course of the game.
In designing Phantom Ink, we leaned on the familiar 20 Questions mechanic to make the game approachable—players ask questions and receive clues each turn to guess a secret object. To create a micro puzzle, the game incentivizes players to cut off their cluegiver in the middle or writing the answer. For example, if players ask the question “What color is the secret object?” and their cluegiver (Spirit) begins to write “Y-E,” players have to solve the puzzle “what color starts with “YE”? But in order to win the game, players have to solve the macro puzzle: what object do all of the partial clues describe? On top of these necessities, we chose to make Phantom Ink a more thematic experience than many modern party games. Players routinely are immersed in the ouija-inspired seance-like experience.
Behind the curtain, Phantom Ink’s puzzles function on information asymmetry. Each turn, your team asks a question. You know what that question is, but the other team doesn’t get to see the question card. But both teams see the written answer. So the winning team will often be the team that is most successful at knowing when to say “Silencio” and cut of their Spirit’s written answer. You want to cut your teammate off to maximize the difference between the information you get (knowing the context of the question) and the information your opponents get (lacking that context). Meanwhile, Spirits have to choose which question card to answer while balancing how important the information they’re going to reveal is with how subtly they can reveal it (how much info they can hide behind the opponents not knowing the context of the question card).