Falling Whale Games could not have bought the kind of attention Possess Me, Satan got this week. The five-to-sixteen-player social deduction game, in which one player is secretly possessed by the ghost of a murderer, is now sitting at #5 on BoardGameGeek hotness chart after BGG sacked its long-serving advertising manager for refusing to run the game ad campaign.
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Find events near youThe story exploded across Reddit, X and the BGG forums on Tuesday after publisher Falling Whale shared advertising manager Chad Krizan email refusing to run the campaign on personal religious grounds. BGG founder Scott Alden fired Krizan within six hours of the post going public. By 21 May the game had climbed to fifth place on BGG hotness chart, and Wargamer reports the Gamefound campaign added $5,600 in pledges overnight.
The campaign now sits well past $22,000 from nearly 400 backers, comfortably above its $10,000 goal, with several weeks of campaign still to run. For a debut game from a tiny studio that openly leans on shock branding and borrows heavily from Blood on the Clock Tower, that is a startling result. The headline mechanic is that the moderator gets their own role card (yes, they play Satan) along with a secret win condition tied to predicting which mortal survives.
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Set up your group for freeIt is, as Wargamer noted, a textbook Streisand effect. A loud refusal to platform something has spent the past week putting it in front of more eyeballs than any banner ad ever would. Whether that translates into a delivered, well-received game on tables in 2027 is a different question. As a study in modern board game publicity, though, it is already one of the year stranger campaigns.
Sources: Wargamer | BoardGameWire | Gamefound
