Blair Witch Project creators are making a "forgotten" board game supposedly played by fairies

In one of the strangest team-ups of the year, the creators of The Blair Witch Project have collaborated with the designers behind Illimat and the Adventure Zone: Bureau of Balance board game to create Glim, a new competitive title about faeries and deckbuilding with quite the unique origin story.

Glim purportedly started life as an estate sale oddity purchased by The Blair Witch Project’s director Eduardo Sánchez, who sat on the barely-held-together box with no instructions until it found its way into the hands of Twogether Studios’ Jenn Ellis and Keith Baker. Three years of research, reconstruction and design later, and the newly formed Emerald Anvil is preparing to crowdfund a modern version of this fey card game (in case it's not obvious: this backstory is a fanciful fabrication, a la Blair Witch's film premise).

At its most simplistic, Glim is a competitive deckbuilding game that uses dice and push-your-luck style rules to drive players towards control of the fairy homeworld of Hada. Each of four players will control a representative of a powerful fairy dominion and do magical battle in either short, single-round skirmishes or more drawn-out conflicts stretching across several turns. Regardless, a player’s path to victory lies in collecting the titular Glim resource and controlling more of the circular cloth board than any other opponent.

Most of these rules are either modern creations of Twogether Studios or the product of three years’ researching stories and other folk games that purport to trace their origins back to the realm of fairies - or at least its influence. A press release ties Glim to Emerald Anvil’s wider narrative efforts, which includes a folk horror podcast, original novel and - regrettably - an interactive worldbuilding game powered by NFTs.

While crypto technology doesn’t seem present in any of the other properties, Battle for Hada boasts a mostly incomplete timeline except for a promise to mint a bunch of digital hexes on a map that players will fight to control, ultimately creating a palette on which Emerald Anvil’s Gregg Hale (The Blair Witch Project) and Mark Ordesky (executive producer on The Lord of the Rings trilogy) will ostensibly tell “hundreds of narrative events”, all based around the fate of a human enclave that Hale and Ordesky characterise as living like slaves, “or worse”.

How much you enjoy Glim’s apocryphal and spooky internet forum-esque origin story likely depends on your stomach for crypto-adjacent storytellers cornering a technology that we all assumed went bust about two years ago. The production values aren’t bad at all - modern Glim has the look of a small press boxed title with some solid layout and graphic design - and the short gameplay introduction leaves me intrigued to learn more when its Kicsktarter campaign launches on April 23rd.

But when the press release emphasises Glim’s “truly special” connection to a sneaky NFT game concept, I’m forced to look at everything with a healthy amount of scepticism. You can see the DNA of The Blair Witch Project all over Glim’s mysterious roots as a fairy game that somehow trickled down to human hands, but I’m not yet sold on the edgier worldbuilding elements that are more pronounced in Emerald Anvil’s directly produced works. More information can be found on the company’s website.