Designer Diary: Phantom Ink

Mary Flanagan and I are longtime collaborators and co-designers at Resonym. We've worked together on Visitor in Blackwood Grove, Mechanica, Surrealist Dinner Party, and now our spooky party game Phantom Ink, which is coming out February 23, 2022. The design process for Phantom Ink had a bunch of interesting influences that Mary and I wanted to talk about!

Mary: I had always wanted to make a game about ouija or ouija boards (also known as spirit boards) since childhood, when I had spooky experiences while regularly getting my friends together to commune with the world beyond. I'm also obsessed with Spiritualists, the 19th century group that tried to photograph fairies and ghosts using new technologies like the camera. I personally had a weird series of ouija communications with an alleged spirit who claimed to be a 19th century murderer in London, for example.

In early 2020, I spied some perfect art: cats holding a seance. This hilarious image brought it all back.

Max: I love spooky Halloween aesthetics, and I love cats, so this game was meant to be!

This designer diary is from both of us.

Pandemic Influences

Phantom Ink immediately just spoke to us. It obviously had to be a party game. Not only is ouija itself a party activity, but the game had to involve spelling out words. Even after many iterations, the spelling out of a word, letter by letter, has always been a core aspect of Phantom Ink. Word games are super approachable to new players!

Artists and creators are always influenced by the events of the time, and Phantom Ink was no exception. A certain...large, global event happened — I don't think we can refer to the pandemic in past tense yet? — starting in March 2020 that made us concerned about a bunch of players having their hands all touching the planchette. (That's the little pointer that you use on a ouija board.) This was not good, so we introduced a new design constraint: What if you could play this game from six feet away without sharing the key components?

This quickly took shape into the recognizable core mechanism of Phantom Ink! The game is essentially a competitive "20 Questions" with a bunch of caveats. Players are divided into two teams. Each team has a Spirit player and one or more Mediums. Mediums take turns asking their Spirit questions about a secret object, but instead of yes or no questions ("Is it red?"), they ask open-ended questions, like "What color is it?", from a hand of question cards.

The Spirit player knows the secret object — which is the same object for both teams. In the initial prototypes, they would spell out the answer to the question letter by letter by moving the planchette on a ouija board. Also, the initial prototypes had only one Spirit player so that no components needed to be shared. The Spirit touched the planchette, and the Mediums touched their cards.

Max playtesting an early Phantom Ink prototype

with the Resonym playtest team masked, distanced, and outdoors

Ouija Influences

To make "20 Questions" an interesting competitive game, we knew there needed to be a twist. Insider does it by adding a traitor. Phantom Ink's twist was going to lie in asymmetry, that your opponents see your team's answers, but not which questions you had asked. Even so, it quickly became clear that "YELLOW" as an answer can be pretty revealing, even if you don't know the question.

So we added the resounding call of "Silencio!" to stop the Spirit writing in mid-word. The Spirit player is tasked with spelling out the answer to the Medium's question letter by letter. As a Medium, when you think you know what the Spirit is communicating, you say "Silencio!" and the Spirit must stop. If the Medium(s) ask, "What color is it?" and the Spirit writes "Y", well, you can probably call "Silencio!" immediately!

Suddenly, we had an exciting tension in the game: Players want to let the Spirit keep writing so they are confident of their answer, but they also want to cut the Spirit off sooner to deny their opponents information. The question cards are shared only among each team, so there's hidden information. How exciting!

Eventually, as much as we desperately desired to include a ouija board and a planchette in the game, we replaced it with a (decorated) pad of paper where the Spirit writes the answers to the questions.

This change was due to two issues that came up during playtesting: Playtesters wanted to take notes on the answers to past questions, and it was too common for a player to miss one of the letters that the Spirit pointed to with the planchette in the ouija prototype. That said, the ouija influence is still clear in the game's letter-by-letter mechanism that we never would have come up with otherwise, not to mention all of Phantom Ink's aesthetic: symbols, candles, the all-seeing eye.

In fact, the ouija influence is still so clear that a couple of playtesters have recused themselves because they were uncomfortable playing the game, presumably because they were worried they would summon an actual spirit. Rest assured, the pencil in the game box will not move of its own accord.

Finishing Touches

From these design choices, the rest of the game fell into place.

As it became clear that Covid is largely not transmitted through touch, we were able to release some of our shared component constraints. Instead of our original thought of having one Spirit and a bunch of other players (Mediums) competing, kind of like our previous game Visitor in Blackwood Grove, it made much more sense to go with a classic party game structure: two teams, each with one cluegiver (Spirit) and 1-3 guessers (Mediums).

We added a few important tweaks, like the spaces marked with the "eye" icon; "eye" spaces allow teams to get more information about a previous clue to help hurry the game along if players were very aggressive with their silencios.

The only remaining major change, though, was how questions worked. Initially in the design process, Mediums invented their own open-ended questions and wrote them on whiteboards, which they secretly showed to their Spirit. The creativity of what kind of question to ask was fun because the weirder the question (while still being useful), the less likely the other team would be able to make sense of the answer.

But there was a snag. It turns out that when asked to think of a question, almost all the questions players think up are "yes or no" questions. "Yes or no" questions are really boring in Phantom Ink because you can't learn anything from your opponents' answers. Multiple choice questions (like "Is it more red, blue, or green?") are barely more interesting than "yes or no" questions because you can call "Silencio!" after the first letter — so where do you draw the line?

This led to a laundry list of restrictions for what kinds of questions were allowed, which made coming up with open-ended questions even harder. Once we started playtesting outside of our team, players had a very hard time coming up with open-ended questions. It took a lot of mental energy.

It took us a while until we realized that (aha!) the answer was to have players choose their questions from a hand of pre-written question cards. The question cards are THE key component of the game. The addition of these cards had the added bonus of letting us include hilariously weird questions that are sometimes very helpful, like "If it were an animal, what animal would it be?" You can now metagame a bit by knowing the questions in the deck, but we added a few cards to make that not a sure thing either, like "What has NOTHING to do with it, just to confuse the other team?"

We knew the game was just about ready when a couple of playtesters described it as "like Decrypto, but way easier to learn". It was a very flattering comparison, and we think the likeness comes from how most classic and modern party games challenge you to give clues and guess each round, and when you do it well you get points, but you can then ignore previous clues. Both Decrypto and Phantom Ink challenge you to give good clues each round, but unlike other party games, in order to win you have to synthesize the clues given throughout the game into something greater!

Our Favorite Part

In retrospect, we find it really interesting to note how Phantom Ink's gameplay was shaped by the pandemic, by online prototyping and playtesting, and by the ouija board planchette mechanism!

We are also extremely proud of how the game turned out; it's got puzzles to solve each round ("Do I know enough of this clue to call silencio?"), creative decisions to make ("How can I answer this question so that the opponents don't know what I'm writing?"), and of course one big puzzle to solve each game ("What's the secret object?"). Seriously, we still have fun replaying this game even after playtesting and demoing it hundreds of time!

But perhaps our favorite part of Phantom Ink is that you can play it from a single snapshot, so we will leave you with this game in progress. Can you figure out the secret object?

Your first question was "What body part do you use it with?" and the first few letters of the answer were "MOU." Your second was "What's a variety it comes in?" and the answer was "PEPP." You don't get to see the opponent's question, but their answer was "PINEA." All three word fragments describe the same single-word object! Good luck.

We'd love to chat about Phantom Ink and its design here! Also feel free to post your guesses about what the secret object is!

Max Seidman

(Note: Phantom Ink was initially known as Ghost Writer, but we changed the name for reasons. You may have heard of it under the old name! It's the same game!)