He signed his work seventy-eight times. No one saw it.

Pamela Colman Smith — friends called her Pixie — was born in London in 1878 to a Brooklyn father and a New England mother. She spent her childhood between Kingston, Jamaica, and the London theater scene, and saw colors when she heard music. Synesthesia — that neurological phenomenon where senses intertwine and a sound can become a shape, color, image inside the listener's head. The first time it happened to her was listening to Bach. In 1908, interviewed by Strand Magazine, she said a phrase that still resonates today.

Pixie was the first woman painter to exhibit at Alfred Stieglitz's gallery 291 — the place that was defining American modern art in those years. She had published two books on Jamaican folklore, founded a publishing house dedicated to women writers, designed posters for the suffragist movement, and lived for decades with a woman named Nora Lake. She was an intimate friend of Bram Stoker, W. B. Yeats, and Ellen Terry. She was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn alongside Aleister Crowley. At thirty-one, in 1909, one of her Golden Dawn companions — Arthur Edward Waite — commissioned seventy-eight tarot cards from her. She finished them in a few months. Pen and ink, some watercolors. Flat fee. No royalties.

That deck would become the standard tarot of the planet — over one hundred million copies in circulation, twenty countries, infinite remakes. Pixie would see almost none of it. She would die on September 18, 1951, at seventy-three, from a heart problem, in a small town in Cornwall. Without heirs. Without money — she had spent what little she had on lavish dinners and church restorations. Buried in an unmarked grave.

One hundred and sixteen years after those seventy-eight cards, an American designer named Jeff Grisenthwaite brings a prototype to Zev Shlasinger — the man who founded Z-Man Games in 1999 and brought Pandemic, Agricola, Carcassonne, Terra Mystica to North America. In 2023, Shlasinger started from scratch with a new company, Play to Z. The prototype uses Pixie's twenty-two cards, now in the public domain.

Her name is not on the Soothsayers box. It appears inside, in the credits. Small, alongside Grisenthwaite's. It's not a full triumph. But it's the first time a board game calls her by name. And if you pick up any of her cards in this game and look closely, the monogram is still there. In the corner. Where she put it in 1909.

In Soothsayers, you have four actions before you: earn coins, draw cards, level up, capture a tarot. You choose one. You do it. So far, nothing strange. The game begins after — when it's up to the others to decide what to do with your move.

Every action you play, everyone else can follow. If they have developed that field at least as much as you, they follow for free. If they are behind, they must pay you coins equal to the level difference. If they don't want to follow — or can't afford it — they pass, and console themselves with a few pennies. It's a small forced contract: every move you make is also an offer, and every player at the table must respond with a paid yes, a free yes, or a no.

This tension — every move is a public offer — overturns a deeply ingrained habit in modern engine-building. In many games, each player plants their own garden. You only look up at the end of the game to compare scores. Not here. Here, every turn of the others is also yours: you have to decide whether to jump on it, let it pass, or invest coins to stay connected to a train you're not driving. And while you decide, you hold the Empress. Or Death. Or The World.

This is where you understand why Soothsayers works even without knowing the rules. The mechanics are solid — Boris from Rue du jeu placed it number one in his Essen 2025 top — but it's not the mechanics that make you remember it. You remember it because you're paying three coins to capture Death. Because you just stole a Fate Token from whoever controlled the Empress. Because on the table in front of you are twenty-two figures with one hundred and sixteen years of history, and you are using them as pieces of an engine.

There's a recurring moment in Soothsayers that produces a small jolt. When you place the crystal ball on the Capture action, count your coins, look at the market, and think: Death costs me four, I can take it. It's a phrase that would sound at least strange outside the game world. Inside the game, it's pure resource management. And it is precisely in that dissonance — not in the mechanics — that the pleasure of Soothsayers lies.

Psychologists have a precise name for that jolt.

Psychology

Taboo Trade-Off Philip Tetlock described it in 2000: when asked to treat a sacred value as if it were a secular value — especially monetary — the human reaction is not neutral. There is indignation, embarrassment, discomfort. Or, if the operation is framed within a protected context, fascination. Vertiginous curiosity. The subtle pleasure of looking at something that usually isn't looked at. Soothsayers is entirely about that. The game puts Death, Judgment, The World, The Moon in your hand — figures that outside the box are objects of divination, ritual, existential doubt — and asks you how many coins you need to buy them. It's a forbidden transaction performed in a safe place. That's why the jolt doesn't repel. That's why you remember it after the game is over. Tetlock, Kristel, Elson, Green & Lerner · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000

The circle closes itself. Pixie Smith, in 1909, considered those twenty-two figures a sacred work — the representation of a symbolic system that she herself practiced within the Golden Dawn. She drew her initials in a corner of each because no one else would have done it for her. Today we buy them for four coins to unlock an ability. And the interesting part is not that we have desecrated something. It's that the game works precisely because we know, deep down, that those figures are not normal cardboard pieces. That someone, before us, considered them important enough to sign them seventy-eight times.

Soothsayers is not a game where mechanics come first. It's a game where you know from the start that there's a story, and the mechanics come later to give you permission to touch it.