by Elusive2

Written by Sam Gullman (concept and game design) and Leonie Magnusson (graphic design and illustration)

The Beginning

Sam Gullman: It was the summer of 2018, and I decided I needed to do something. Working full time as an automotive engineer was interesting and fun, but some of the challenge was gone, and I was getting anxious. Designing games had been in my blood since I was a child, but I had never done so professionally, which is about to become evident to the reader. Regardless, I decided to take leave from work to force myself to get it out of my system. It had to be done.

I have always loved board games as a medium, and our hobby is truly unique. I wanted to bring something back to it, a real contribution that I had not seen done before and that combined two of my passions: horror and strategy board games.

The Presence started as a side project while I was wondering how to proceed with my real design: an enormous deck-based dungeon-crawl monster that would bring roguelikes to the tabletop space.

Well, let's just say I never got there. This leave lasted only two months or so, and I promptly got back to work facing new exciting challenges, but the idea never truly died out. I continued, coming back to the project over and over. Needless to say, the idea spun out of control, and now, seven years later I'm shaking my head as I write this.

2018: The initial concept for "the ghost game"
Premise and Design Goals

As a lifelong fan of horror, and especially of slow, emotional horror, I had an idea for a small card game to get started — a one-versus-all game in which the "one" was secretly either good or evil, the first game (to my knowledge) in which you did not know whether it was one-versus-all or one-with-all.

The idea was to recreate the feeling of a slow-burn ghost horror movie in which you are unsure whether the ghost means you harm or is just trying to reach out, seeking your aid and understanding. The tension hangs in the air and keeps you asking the question: Can I trust the ghost..?

I had a few central tenets for the design:

• Trust as the core tension
• Player-driven horror
• Mechanisms first
• Emergent narrative

Instead of a small card game like the mix between The Resistance and Not Alone that I initially imagined, The Presence became a large thematic game positioned in a genre somewhere between Battlestar Galactica and Fury of Dracula, with a dash of Nemesis thrown in. The design is now something similar in theme to Betrayal at House on the Hill, but with less randomness and a higher focus on strategy and deduction.

What is lurking on the threshold?
The Path of Development

In all creative endeavors, the idea is the easy part. The energizing drive of an idea fuels you initially, but then comes the work. This is where you find out how little you know and how much you have left to learn, over and over again.

This journey has seen six or seven major physical prototypes and probably ten times more prints of the cards and components — even though we did a significant amount of playtesting online in the Covid-years. What follows are some of the greatest design challenges we faced.

2018: The first prototype
The Good-Ghost Problem

It was obvious where to start: the ghost player. Clearly its alignment (good or evil) needed to be randomly determined since the premise of the game required its intentions to be ever in doubt. The ghost player got randomly assigned an objective called the "script", connecting the theme to its ghost-movie roots.

During the first three years, I faced the largest challenge of the whole project without a solution in sight: How can the game be designed such that it was not immediately obvious whether the ghost was good or evil? How to maintain the tension and dread? Playtesters pointed out again and again that when the ghost was evil, the game was fun, scary, and exciting, but when the ghost was good, the experience fell flat.

Imagine needing to let the ghost player affect the board and the other players while progressing towards its goals, but without visitors knowing whether it is helping or hindering them. If I would have given up on this concept, I'm certain that I could have been finished two years earlier. However, this was what made the game unique. This was the whole premise! Multitudes of one-vs-all games are out there, and I knew it was not good enough to just add one more to the pile.

We are now at a state where the good ghost is equally exciting to play against and not immediately obvious. The solution was not a single brilliant design-idea; instead it was to hone in on trust in everything, to make the decisions that players face have a large consequence in either direction at one point in the game, while also keeping enough of the game-state hidden so that an evil ghost would have ways to pretend to play nice...for a while.

Reaching this state took a slow progress of adding and removing mechanisms, testing, refining, and keeping what worked. In the end, I think this is what makes The Presence unique, and I'm proud we did not take the easy way out.

2020: digital (Covid times) prototype
Excitement without an Event Deck?

Co-ops often keep players on edge with growing random threat escalation, along with a random event deck that affects the board state, as well as snippets of flavor text. This works, but I've never been fond of this system. These decks often come with heaps of flavor text that interrupt the gameplay and rarely make much sense in the context of the story players are seeing in their heads.

I wanted the story to primarily come through the mechanisms and player choices rather than random events. I wanted to let the players tell the story of their game, not have it be told to them by a random generator. The ghost would be the main driver of exciting events, and its deck of cards formed the "event deck" of the game.

2021: Early spirit cards
I got to work setting up a system of interacting card effects and combos in a custom deck for the spirit, much of which remains in the game today. Each spirit has a unique deck of varied powers, which allowed me to design enough effects to be viable for both good and evil ghosts, as well as evil ghosts pretending to be good.

While this system saw streamlining during development, I never really questioned it. By necessity, it needed to be complex and varied. This was the only way I could keep the players on edge and prevent the game from becoming pure mathematical deduction. It was needed for the narrative weight.

2021: The second major prototype
This is the main reason The Presence grew to become a medium-weight strategic horror instead of the light card game I initially envisioned. The rest of the game complexity grew out of the need to give the ghost varied ways to thematically affect the board state, then balance out the complexity level with the visitor side.

Mystery with Replayability

What about the living? The visitors are the unfortunate human characters trapped in the spirits' domain, unable to find a way out. The visitors needed ways to interact with the spirit player, but their goal had to be something else, something that they could aim to accomplish regardless of what the spirit wanted.

The premise was clear. What gives ghosts power over others is often the horrors that formed them — the tragic mystery of their past. Once you understand the ghost, it loses its power over you.

The visitors' objective would be to figure out these past events, then to free the spirit and themselves by releasing it from its eternal existence. In line with the thinking above, I did not want the game to be a pre-scripted narrative that could be experienced only once with all surprises being spent. The mystery needed to be based on mechanisms, not walls of text.

First mystery tokens
Initially the visitors ran around looking for a set of four tokens that were supposed to be arranged in a certain order that only the spirit knew, forming the events and story of its past. Thematically this idea worked; the spirit knew "the past" and could help (or hinder) the visitors' progress by giving them real or false information. This idea was simple and clean, but not especially exciting or thematic. It served its purpose, but never allowed the kind of risk taking and excitement that it should have.

After many iterations, we arrived at the current system. The tokens became four cards that form the "secrets" of the spirit — horrible events that happened during its lifetime. The visitors not only need to deduce in which order they occurred; they need to collect and assign clues (representing knowledge) to them before choosing when to reveal them. Making a wrong move here is dangerous and can be used against them by an evil spirit pretending to help. The visitors will eventually be forced to start revealing these secrets, finding out only then whether what they thought they knew was dangerously wrong...

2022: The third (?) major prototype
This also means that the evil spirit has an incentive to pretend to play nice as it's a viable way for an evil spirit to win entirely through subterfuge...if it plays its cards right. This also means that as soon as the spirit reveals its true nature, the visitors can use its past actions to help deduce the locations of these secrets.

Visitor Actions

While the spirit systems coalesced and formed early, what eventually became the visitor side of the game grew slowly into its current shape. The visitors did not have much to think about at the start of the design; their moves were too scripted, too mathematical, and too simple. The co-operative side of the game lacked strategic depth and significant choices.

2019: First visitor artwork...
The main issue was the visitor action system. Initially, this action-selection system was simple and clean. Each player could choose to move and search around the house, opening doors and exploring along the way. This was elegant, but not that exciting, and some actions were hard to balance without making them feel costly and boring.

Cue the personal deck of cards! This approach works in other games, so why not here? All visitors got their own deck of action cards, drawing to their hand-size limit at the end of each turn. This distributed the actions, and the powerful actions could be made more rare in that deck. This made the game more fun and exciting, the puzzle more interesting, and the incentives to communicate larger. However, some players felt this set-up was too random as they could not always perform meaningful actions on their turn.

2021: Early visitor cards
Okay, what to do? The third attempt was based on the Concordia system of either playing one of several cards from your hand or picking them all up again. This fixed the randomness, and playtesters liked it, but the game lost something, becoming strategic and thinky, with the visitors' analysis-paralysis taking away from the shared experience. Players always love agency, but I knew I had given them too much. This was the final major problem with the base game.

The final iteration came after a long period of not knowing how to fix this problem. I went back to the personal deck of cards in a slimmed down format of only ten, but instead of drawing cards at the end of a visitor's turn, they were forced to take a special "rest" action to draw cards. This meant we could make cards more powerful, while also allowing the players to dig for what they wanted. Each card was worth something, yet they weren't all available to you, which broke up the analysis while giving players control — for a price.

The Communication Problem

Let’s talk about a classic co-op problem: If all the information is known, a single bossy player can start telling others what to do. It's called the "alpha player" issue, and I happen to think it's not a game problem at all, but a player problem. Nevertheless, it is wise to design around it. Early iterations of The Presence had a lot of communication going on between visitors. Partly this was fine as people liked being able to discuss and optimize.

I watched these games, and although our group lacked the infamous alpha player, I felt that something was not coming together. With the game focused on deduction and strategy, there was a lot of talking, which seemed to engage the players...but not in the way I was looking for. It also left the ghost player out of all the fun, seeing as they were not allowed to chip in, while the visitor players spent way too much time discussing optimal moves. Good game, bad horror.

Clustered up, visitors can talk...
I added a rule that said visitor players could speak to each other only if they were in the same room. Suddenly the game was very different. This created a new dynamic that fit with the horror theme; since players could no longer help each other and share information, they had to make choices on their own. This was mostly accepted by players — and some really liked it. Players started actively walking to each other simply to speak, then walking back again. Amazing!

However, some games became too silent, and for players who were alone, they felt left out of the experience. In the end, I tuned this rule to allow speaking across a single doorway, making it kind of a compromise and much more forgiving. The change did add the nice detail that a door closing became scary since it cut players off from one another. As a side effect, this rule solves the issue of alpha gaming, and people who try The Presence usually come away thinking it was one of the most novel parts of the experience.

...but separated, they cannot
Breathing Life into Death

At the start of this journey, I set out to design the game alone, along with the support of my partner and close friends. They helped me keep the project on track with a combination of hard truths and endless patience for my obsession. I did not think about publishing, other than as a possible abstract idea. For the longest time, the game was simply not ready, which meant I did not have to take the proposition seriously. As it slowly improved, however, the idea started pushing on my mind.

The mechanisms were slowly taking shape, but still in the form of my hand-cut, black-and-white copy and Excel tables. In a fit of pure impulse, I started looking for an artist, someone who could help me flesh out the theme and visuals that I imagined the game needed. By the purest of luck, I ran across Sergey on the BGG forums, and we started developing the characters of the game together.

Sketch of the Detective
The final look
I suddenly realized the cost it would mean to put color to this vision of mine, but I was also taken aback by how talented and skilled Sergey was at making the characters I had designed come to life. We worked well together, and it was a lot of fun. Publication or not, this was happening!

During the winter of 2020/2021, we created a lot of the characters, revision after revision. Sergey also set the style of the art and the general themes of visitor and spirit design.

Concept spirit art, unused 
Veiled In Moonlight — final art 
After this, I had really put myself in a bind. I now had spent a non-trivial amount on art, which still was likely only 25% of the total needed to finish the game — and I had a half-finished game to accompany it. Perfect.

I thought about pitching the game to a publisher, but realized it would not work. I knew a publisher would want to develop and change the game to appeal to a wider audience. They might not approve of the art-style; the themes of the game are mature and not suitable for all audiences. No, I did not want to give up ownership — this game would be made according to the vision or not at all.

Publishing myself was still a distant idea as the work it would require was significant. As sometimes happens, fate intervened. Around that time I started discussing it with a friend of a friend: Leonie Magnusson. As a designer, professional illustrator, and hobbyist board gamer, she was curious and found the project interesting. Having designed a board game as a thesis project, and being interested in the idea of developing one professionally, we slowly started discussing things like icons, art, and design.

Mostly for fun at the start, I showed her the concept and theme, the icons I had been using as placeholders, the art that was already in place, and the general aesthetic style I intended for the game. We started jumping between small parts of the project. I realized that I had vastly underestimated the time and commitment it would take to finish everything, but we were having a lot of fun.

It took a while, but as we got to know each other better, we realized we complemented each other well. She had all the skills I did not — graphic design, illustration, web-design, social media — and she brought an incredible amount of positive energy and enthusiasm. Together we could do this!

During the spring of 2022, we started for real. We were about to find out that developing a game for publishing is a very different thing than doing it as one's hobby side project.

The end of a fateful playtest session 
The Power of Collaboration

Leonie Magnusson: As the graphic designer and one of the illustrators of The Presence, I want to share my story behind this game and express my deepest thanks to everyone who has supported us on this long and life-changing journey.

I remember our first play session, just a couple of weeks after Sam and I had met in a local climbing gym. This was not my type of game, and it was clearly unfinished. Players had to wait forever; there were too many rules and too little to do besides waiting for other people to act. Nevertheless, I enjoyed discussing the game with Sam, and it sparked an interest and curiosity.

What I did find to be interesting about the concept for The Presence was the psychological aspects that he wanted the player to experience. He had this idea that evil is something that can be found in all of us, and therefore it can be understood. I think he wanted to humanize the misunderstood, the outsiders, or those who are called monsters by others. He kept saying that the game is about trust. Well, I always thought it was a game about empathy, and I guess that was what made me want to work on it.

Afterwards, Sam asked whether he could pay me to help him with icons and card designs for his game. At the time, I was a design student who had worked on a couple of board games, though I had never succeeded in publishing any of them. I agreed because it sounded fun, and I've always loved creating art with other people.

The artwork Sergey had already created is among the few elements that remain largely unchanged in the final game. Not only that, but this artwork also laid the foundation for the overall design and art direction that was to take shape in the years to come — while we worked together on the project.

2024: Pawn testing
We quickly realized that a couple of icons and some card layouts wouldn't do the job. What was needed was a graphic design concept for the whole game that would support the story, the game play, and the overall atmosphere. What we also realized was that we liked working together. We are different people with very different talents and interests, but I think that was exactly what made it work so well. We always had respect for each other's opinions and never tried to take over the other one's domain.

2024: Spirit die design
2024: Factory die samples
2024: Final spirit die
Therefore, I was happy when Sam asked whether I wanted to become his fully equal project partner, even though I thought that his game still wasn't ready. What I do admire about Sam is that this never stopped him. After returning his job, he had to pause his work on The Presence multiple times, but the desire to finish the game never left. The finished game is the product of all those hours.

Playtest card
Early card design
Final card design
From 2022 to 2023, we made significant progress on The Presence. We both had plenty of time to dedicate to it, with no deadlines and no stress — just the joy of exploring the world we were creating together. Looking back, I probably made a hundred different versions of every single component, while Sam continually revised the gameplay, but that was okay for us. Creating the game felt like a form of play itself, and I'm glad we had that time because things have become much more serious since then.

One of the largest single projects was the art for the game board. The first draft took me three months of work in the summer of 2022 to finish. It was a massive project, but once we got it on the table, we realized how much more immersive and fun it was to play on a real board. Suddenly, our Wrightwatch Manor was a real and horrifying place. We were both giddy with joy as it made such a difference for the experience.

Ground floor — sketch
Ground floor — final board
In 2023, everything became more focused. We wanted to show the world that we were ready to take the game to the next level. Since the vision for the game included mature horror elements (and Sam would not accept watering it down), we saw self-publishing The Presence through crowdfunding as our best option, so we founded Purple Lantern Games, attended board game fairs and conventions, and slowly built a community curiously following our progress.

A significant step was when we started to construct our public prototypes. These were to be used for public playtests, for blind playtests, and as material for Kickstarter previews. We printed, cut, and glued; we ordered cards and punched tokens. Countless hours later, we had produced twelve copies of The Presence, no longer black-and-white but in full color! We were exhausted, but our reward was satisfaction of reaching this critical important milestone.

2023: Punching tokens and ordering cards
The assembly line
Going Public

Sam Gullman: We had a choice to make: now we both spent another year on the project, still as a hobby, and mostly because we liked it. We needed to make a choice: publish or don't. All kinds of stuff that you don't think about is required when you go from simply doing a thing to forming a company to bring that thing into production. This was the final chance to step away.

However, at the start of 2023 we together formed Purple Lantern Games as our vessel for bringing The Presence to life. We more or less stepped right into budgeting, tax law, project planning, production processes and cost calculations, webpage design, social media, and the biggest milestone of them all: multiple conventions to let you all know that we exist.

Flyers! 
We probably didn't have to attend all of those conventions, but we wanted to. The plan was to attend the big two in Europe, but first we needed practice. In Sweden, the largest convention is GothCon, which is also the largest in the entire Nordic region and probably one of the oldest in the world (starting in 1977). However, with its ~2,000 attendees it's still tiny. This was to be our first real test. Would the game be received well by people who didn't know us?


GothCon 2023
Coming out of GothCon, we learned a lot. Never had so many people played The Presence for the first time, and we got so much useful feedback on the first-play experience and the graphic design. I realized, even more than earlier, the importance of good player aids, good teaching materials, and intuitive rules. Stuff that was no challenge for our experienced testers confused the newcomers. Overall, we got a lot of encouraging feedback, though, and it fueled us to keep going.

We attended a second Swedish convention, LinCon, before we had the first real test. Packing up our banners and games and going together with our partners, we set off to the country where the game is supposedly (but not decidedly) set: Great Britain. The objective was to show the game to as many people as we could talk to, gather feedback, meet industry partners, and simply...survive.



UK Games Expo 2023 
With its 50,000+ attendees, UK Games Expo is the second largest event in the European region. It was a different beast entirely and overwhelming in scale. We talked to hundreds of you. We got amazing feedback on the game, language corrections, and people intrigued by our specific theme. We survived. Hey, we even felt somewhat professional.

The exhaustion was real. Luckily we had a whole summer after this to reflect, develop, and prepare for what was to come — which we really needed since next up was the largest board game expo in the world: SPIEL Essen, with its almost 200,000 attendees. We were reinforced by dedicated friends and family, and attended in force with six people. SPIEL Essen is an almost week-long event for an exhibitor and not to be taken lightly.

We brought two full playtesting tables and a small table for viewing. As the gates opened on Thursday, the initial flood of people rushed to buy new games...and not many stopped by our booth. We talked to a few people, but the first hour was worryingly calm.

Then it happened: People started coming, and soon we had more people to talk to than we could keep up with at times. Interest was high as many were pulled in by the artwork and dark style, asking curious and detailed questions. Some of you sat down to play a full game (despite the noise). At the end of Thursday, we were fully booked on Friday for playtesting, and soon the rest of the week. Our playtest sheets ran out halfway. What a blast!

For someone who had been to SPIEL five times as a visitor, actually exhibiting felt incredible. Coming out of SPIEL, we were completely wasted, but loaded with feedback and ideas. Thankfully we could now creep back into our crypt and start prepping for the final and most important show of all: the Kickstarter campaign.


SPIEL Essen 23

Playtesting at SPIEL
The Narrative Campaign

2023 was a busy year. We were getting all the feedback we needed from public playtests to streamline and smooth out the experience, and after all of this the base game was mostly ready — but I felt something was still missing.

When I first set out to design The Presence, I wanted it to tell stories. I wanted to see whether by purely using game mechanisms, I could create a dynamic horror board game that did not rely on one-time written content. The game had survived its public test as players said it was tense and exciting, but it was also clear it did not live up to that initial lofty goal. I wanted the player to feel immersed enough for the horror to make a true impact.

Campaign playtest notes
Horror is elusive, coming out only when several ingredients are in perfect balance. We need to be immersed, invested, vulnerable, and exposed. Board games that attempt horror walk a thin line between dread and frustration. Only through the lens of a story can you as a player perceive the horrible outcome to your character in a way that doesn't push you away from the experience.

As players, we focus on game mechanisms, on optimizing, on winning. A game is a vessel for problem solving, and while the base game of The Presence does evoke tension and anxiety like I want it to, it was lacking the emotional impact I hoped to achieve: investment, narrative, a sense of stakes. To my own horror, I realized what it was missing.

I needed to break through the gamer mind and make the game come to life. I needed to make players invested beyond a single game, and fear for the fates of their characters. As the art and graphic design were making the world of the game come to life, I set out to create, through hundreds more hours of writing and playtesting, what would almost become a second game: the narrative campaign.

Campaign playtesting
This forced me to give up the lofty goals of "no prewritten narrative" and "no reading of text". After all, I had done my best with the base game, and it did tell good emergent stories. My focus on mechanisms had created a foundation that could stand on its own, while also being a solid base for a written narrative.

That said, the narrative needed to be integrated well into the game, not something that players had to churn through before they could get back to playing. It had to make sense with the freedom that the base game mechanisms allowed. It needed to explain why the spirits were so unreliable and why the visitors were stuck at Wrightwatch.

In 2023 and 2024, the campaign was written, re-written, and re-designed many, many times as idea after idea died on the chopping block. Writing narrative for reading is one thing, but text to be read out loud needs to be short, crisp, and evocative. Its scenarios and game mechanisms saw numerous revisions as my initial ideas had to evolve with the reality of play at the table. Meanwhile, the dark world I imagined for the game was gradually fleshed out and fully realized.

As the narrative was being written, it was also being played. Our core group of playtesters took half a year to play through the material, allowing me to edit and rewrite the text and perfect the campaign specific mechanisms. As the narrative grew, several other groups around the globe offered to play through it, giving us invaluable feedback and advice. Thank you, guys! We could not have come this far without you!

2025: Final secret cards for the base game, which will work differently in campaign mode
The campaign has a non-linear structure and will offer a strong sense of discovery and mystery, while you gradually uncover the horrible secrets that dwell in Wrightwatch manor. You will play visitors who are mysteriously invited there, exploring its dark and tragic past while trying to cling on to what sense of self you still have left.

As in the base game, one person will play the spirit, one of the forgotten inhabitants of the manor, struggling with their own traumatic past and uncontrollable emotions. Players are encouraged to rotate roles and experience both sides to fully understand them. The experience will not be for the faint of heart, and it is fully possible that all visitors will succumb to the darkness before having a chance to understand or escape this cursed place.

You may expect a story of life and death, of good and evil, but things are rarely that simple, are they? An ancient desire is stirring here, and your visit may just have pushed it over the edge.

What is lurking beyond the threshold on Wrightwatch manor? What really happened in this cursed place? In the campaign you may live to find out, or succumb to what dwells there...
The Moment of Truth

Leonie Magnusson: In February 2024, after an intense year of game design, marketing, and me having my first child, we finally launched our Kickstarter campaign.

I remember that day vividly. It was the 27th, and we were refreshing the Kickstarter page frantically. Within minutes, the backer count started climbing. Hundreds of people had waited for the moment our campaign launched and were now pledging. Friends started calling — it was surreal. After the first two hours, we had over six hundred backers and were fully funded! Experiencing this support from our community was one of the most magical things imaginable.

Final board
Over the next thirty days, we gained the trust of more than two thousand backers to support the completion and production of The Presence. After the successful Kickstarter campaign, we spent the following months finalizing every detail, eventually sending the game off to our production partner, Whatz Games, who helped us perfect our prototype for manufacturing.


Final cards
Setting out on a journey like this may be longer and more winding that one imagines. Seven years have passed since it started. Doing so for the first time especially, you learn to stay humble and approach each challenge with an open mind. Some things may seem like roadblocks, but they are just a bend in the road. Looking back, we've learned many things, but the most important is this: Even with all the energy in the world, no one can make a board game alone.

2025: Seven years, we finally made it
Going from "I" to "we" can be unfamiliar — and perhaps even scary — but what you can do together is so much more than what you can do on your own. In the end, regardless of how it goes, you are sharing the journey and that makes it all worth it.

Thank you, backers, for helping us make The Presence into reality, and thanks to everyone who has contributed and playtested over the years. This game has a little bit of all of you in it. Tread carefully in Wrightwatch manor, or it may claim the rest.

If you search the dark corners of Hall 3, you may find us at SPIEL Essen 25!

With sincere gratitude,
Leonie & Sam