Full disclosure: A review copy of Phantom Ink was provided by Allplay.

Note: This is a review of the new Allplay edition of Phantom Ink. For my review of the original game from Resonym, look here.

It’s Spooky Games Week back at What’s Eric Playing?, a very-inconsistently-applied holiday where I try to review games with vaguely spooky or occult or whatever themes ahead of Halloween. The Phantom of the Opera might have qualified last week, but that’s more of a Gothic Aesthetic than a particular horror theme, though Christine might disagree. As you saw, this week is more about word games and psychics, hence Medium: The Hand of Fate and now, Allplay’s re-release of Phantom Ink! This was done in partnership with Resonym to give a fantastic game a wider release, which I’m always happy to see, so let’s check it out!

In Phantom Ink, players once again seek to contact the World Beyond and ask the spirits living there some questions to prove that it can be done. The intrepid Mediums and their Spirits are communicating across the veil the only way anyone knows how: a Ouija Board! Each turn, Mediums pass their Spirit two question cards and the Spirit chooses one to answer and then answers one letter at a time. The trick is that both spirits are trying to clue their teams to the same word, so too much or too little information can really disadvantage your team! If you think you know the answer, you can say “Silencio!” to get your Spirit to stop cluing letters and giving away more info. At a few points in the game, the Eye of Truth opens to reveal an additional letter from any answer, and if your team knows the clued word they can guess it in lieu of their turn, one letter at a time. It’s a word-guessing game with a lot of spirit; will you be able to beat the other team to the answer?

Overall: 8.25 / 10

It’s honestly sometimes nice to have a game get republished and it remain pretty solid and consistent. Phantom Ink’s new Ouija-themed coat of paint makes it seem a bit glossier and newer than the original edition, but that doesn’t take away from a great party game (that does support two- and three-player modes for the die-hard fans). I’ve always enjoyed Phantom Ink, especially around the spooky season, so getting to see it come back in a travel-friendlier form is always nice. Interesting choice for Allplay to publish it, but they throw a few curveballs here and there if they like the game enough (see: Enchanted Ivy) so in a rare vaguely-pro-capitalism statement from What’s Eric Playing?, you can actually trust the publisher that the game is good enough to bring it over from another publisher. I guess it was a Spiel Recommended game in 2024, so that’s a pretty strong pedigree, as well. I would gently encourage Allplay to maybe take a second pass at the Special Thanks section since they misspelled a name in there, though.

The key question you’ll be reading this review to answer is: do the changes improve or detract from the original game? My answer is simple: it’s a mixed bag. The core of the game remains excellent, but a few things were shifted to make Phantom Ink more transport-friendly, like reducing the amount of paper and using dry-erase boards instead (net positive) and shrinking the card size (net negative). I do appreciate that there’s now a spot for the Spirit players to record their actual answers; part of the fun of this game is the debrief after. The other fun part of the game is that your first game is usually pretty fast because the Spirit players are too helpful, leading to the teams getting too much information too quickly. Your second game is much slower as the Spirits overcorrect. It’s very funny and fairly consistent across my experiences. I like the game a lot! It perfectly captures that word-guessing party game vibe that everyone likes while having a distinct and memorable aesthetic, and the updates and changes haven’t messed with that in the slightest.

I do wish there were something you could do for cloth mats straight out of the box, though. They shifted from a spooky-letter-saying vibe from the original game to a cloth-mat Ouija-esque vibe, but that came with some drawbacks. The problem here is that with the cloth mat Ouija board makes for an uneven surface, so you can’t quite see the indicated letter and that kind of mucks with the spooky vibes of it all. You need to make sure everyone understands the letter that was picked, which ends up just pushing you back to the original style of the game. This cloth is also particularly resistant to rolling out, and I’m loathe to put any board game component under the iron. The planchette (the Ouija-board pointer circle thing) is very nice, though. The aesthetic remains preserved. But if you’re a fan of a spooky-vibes game, you love a party game, or you just like guessing words, Phantom Ink remains a great contender! I’d recommend trying it out.

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