On May 19, Board Game Geek’s advertising manager Chad Krizan was let go from his role, after he rejected an ad campaign for the board game ‘Possess Me, Satan’ on the grounds that the game could be “overtly triggering” for people who had been affected by “demonic oppression” and possession. We and other outlets reported on the kerfuffle on May 20, and as I write this on May 21, Possess Me, Satan sits at #5 on Board Game Geek’s ‘hotness list’ of most visited pages, while its crowdfunding campaign on Gamefound has raised another $5,600 overnight.
I find it hard to attribute the sudden interest in the board game to anything other than the press generated by Krizan’s dismissal. I will be frank – this does not look like one of the best board games to appear on the platform. It doesn’t look bad, either; just another adequate self-published board game, among the thousands that are added to BGG each year and achieve neither fame nor notoriety.
Possess Me, Satan’s core gameplay seems to be a pretty straight copy of Blood on the Clock Tower. Being derivative isn’t a sin in the world of social deduction games, the domain of the Werewolf clone, but it’s hardly a selling point that you would expect to drive hype.
The main rules difference is that the player running the game – who is relentlessly referred to as Satan in the description on Gamefound – has their own role card and unique power, and can try to win the game by predicting who the last player left alive will be. I assume that giving the person facilitating the game a win condition will clash with their necessary role mediating all the whacky interactions between player abilities, but I haven’t tested it and perhaps it works.
I’m not saying the game is bad – I haven’t played it, I don’t know – only that nothing about it would make me peg it as a winner. The game’s main marketing hook is the “shock” value of using the word Satan so prominently. I put “shock” in scare quotes because this isn’t the 1950s; few people find the word transgressive, fewer find it transgressive in a way that lends it taboo-breaking appeal, and of the people who do think it is both cool and edgy, I expect many are still collecting their allowance.
If Krizan had wanted to shield people from this game, he would have done better to run the ads, where they would disappear behind ad-blocker and consumer indifference. As things stand, I can’t really imagine what else he could have done to promote it – a textbook case of the Streisand effect. Though in this case, I think we can call it the Krizan effect.
Have you backed the game? Am I missing something about it that has you really excited? Let me know in the Wargamer Discord community!
Source: Wargamer
