About us

Black Envelope Studios is a one-person independent game studio built around a simple idea: developing tabletop experiences that create lasting group memories for the people playing them.

I wasn’t much of a board game player growing up, but when my wife and I got together in 2014, board games became a much bigger part of my life. She introduced me to many genres of games. Euros, worker placement, trick taking, and many more. I disliked so many of them despite her very determined efforts to win me over. For me, they often felt too heavy, the turns took too long, and my patience was far too short. I would lose focus, drift away from the game, and find myself doing just about anything else.

In almost every game, usually while I was sitting there bored out of my mind, I noticed how focused everyone was on their own turns and what they planned to do next. It often felt like we were playing alongside one another rather than actually playing together.

Then she introduced me to social deduction games.

That changed everything.

What hooked me wasn’t just the game itself, but the interaction between the players. The genuine reactions. The accusations. The sudden eruptions around the table when something unexpected happened. I started noticing that whenever our group got together and talked about games we had played in the past, the stories we remembered most were almost always about these times. Usually it was some dirty, low-down trick someone did, or some deceitful move one of us had pulled on the entire table.

Those were the moments that stuck.

So I started wondering:

“What if I combined my love for RPGs and horror with a game built around forced cooperation and full-blown backstabbing?”

This is how The Veiled Invitation development started in 2018.