Veil

The brief

Veil is a storytelling card game set in the late Victorian era, built around a Spiritualist seance. Players take turns interpreting the cards a Spirit lays down, readings of its Past, its Present, and its Future, using a deck of custom tarot-inspired illustrations. Sometimes the readings end up being about the Spirit. Sometimes they end up being about the people at the table.

It was built with Tori Smith, Camron Gonzalez, and Leslie Zeng for the NYU Game Center 2022 Spring Showcase.

The approach

The thing we wanted Veil to do was let one player guide the story without dictating it. The mechanic that solved it was filters.

Each tarot card has a base illustration. The Spirit (the player guiding the reading) chooses which filter goes over the card , a coloured overlay that changes what the card means and where the story is allowed to go. The same card under a different filter is a different reading. The same reading at a different table is a different game.

That took a lot of print testing. Colours that read clearly on screen didn’t read on paper. Some filters were too subtle. Some looked beautiful but didn’t shift the meaning enough. We iterated through several physical decks before the filter set felt like it carried the mechanic.

The work

Four pieces lived on the table for the longest: the filter mechanic, the rules and setup, the card illustrations, and the playtest.

The filters are the heart of the design. Each card has multiple potential readings; the Spirit chooses one by laying a coloured filter over it. We arrived at the final filter set after a lot of paper prototyping, colour swatches that read on screen often didn’t read in person, and some filters that worked alone competed with the card art they were sitting on top of. The final set is small, deliberately.

Setup is quick. The Spirit takes their place at the head of the table; the Mediums (everyone else) sit facing them. The deck is laid out for the three readings, Past, Present, Future , and the seance begins. The rules are intentionally light: the Spirit guides, the Mediums interpret, and the deck makes the story richer than any single person at the table could have steered it.

I illustrated the deck. The visual language sits somewhere between Victorian engraving and a softer tarot tradition, figures that suggest a story without committing to one, so the filter can shift their meaning. Each card went through roughs first to make sure the silhouette and the negative space would survive a colour overlay, then through finished art.

At the NYU Spring Showcase, Veil wasn’t the loudest game in the room, it was the quietest. Tables of three or four would sit down, lean in, and not get up for fifteen or twenty minutes. The seances people staged were strange and often more personal than the rules implied. Several players walked away with a card they had kept the whole game.

How it landed

Featured at the NYU Game Center 2022 Spring Showcase.

What stayed with me from that showing was how often the table forgot it was playing a game. The Spirit would lay a card, a filter would go down, someone would say something out loud they probably hadn’t planned to. The mechanic made room for that.