In Molly House, a new hidden role game, players compete for queer joy

Tabletop gaming continues to grow in popularity, despite a growth unprecedented for more than 10 years. Popular games are also becoming more diverse in their subject matter, as they increasingly incorporate environmental and social issues. But absent a few notable exceptions, historical games — that is, games inspired by real-world historical events — have lagged somewhat behind, with designers seemingly satisfied to simulate the same conflicts over and over and over again in miniature. A panel of top-notch industry professionals decided in 2021 to try and change this. The Zenobia Award is the result.

Open to anyone from an underrepresented (non-white, non-male) group, “including women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people,” three winners received a cash award for their mechanical marvels based on novel historical themes. However, the true gift came in the form of the mentoring from the same judges. BackerKit has successfully funded a crowdfunding campaign for one of most daring and outstanding board game ideas presented at the conference. Polygon recently had a chat with the team behind Molly HouseLearn more about, an 18th century hidden role game that takes place in the gay community of England.

Image: Wehrlegig Games

In 18th-century England molly houses, which were like a cross between an English tavern or a French salon and where queer people of that time would come to celebrate and socialize. Due to the prejudiced court system in that era, the owners of molly-houses and their customers were shamed and eventually prosecuted.

“There [are] some newspaper clipping and weird tabloid-esque articles telling us all about people who went into the molly houses and experienced it firsthand, and talking about all of these amazing parties they were putting on,” said Jo Kelly, the game’s creator. “They had christening ceremonies where mollies would get splashed in the face with gin, and they would get a maiden name — which is the name that they would use inside the molly house. You have such characters as Princess Seraphina and Miss Kitten. […] Some of them were using the name outside the molly house as well, which I think is where we see a lot of parallels with trans people and trans identities today.”

The Society of the Reformation of Manners, a quasi-police organization that was organized as a backlash against molly houses in Britain led to the establishment of legal interventions which drove them underground. As a result, much of the mollies’ culture was lost. It’s a subject with which designer Cole Wehrle (Pax Pamir, John Company, Oath: Chronicles of Empire & ExileThe’s awe-inspiring.

Image: Wehrlegig Games

“Queer history is subject to routine obliteration,” Wehrle said. “It is something that is constantly erased, trampled over, built over, hidden, encoded.” But that’s not entirely true of the molly houses, whose right to exist was openly fought over in British courts.

“One of the weird quirks of this history is the fact that these people were being persecuted so vociferously,” said Kelly, “that this is all preserved in the records of the Old Bailey — the central court in London.” Ironically, Kelly went on, the rigor of that prosecution is now “one of the main reasons that we have all of this history preserved.”

The existence of those historical records is also due to the method by which the mollies were brought down, which was through informants drawn from inside the queer community — many of whom were blackmailed because of their association. It’s that historical anecdote that Kelly and Wehrle eventually settled on as the core mechanic in the game.

“For a long time we weren’t sure if it should even be in the game,” Wehrle said. “Which is a funny thing, because I think at various points it was probably my favorite thing about the whole project.”

While playing the game Molly HousePlayers will often be approached by officers from the Society of the Reformation of Manners. Players who are caught must take tokens from a bag called “guilt tokens” to draw.

“They’re worth negative joy points at the end of the game,” Kelly said. “But some of those tokens are informer tokens, and you can choose, if you want to, […] to reveal all the informers you’ve got and put them back in the bag. Or, you may choose to keep just one. If you keep one, you become an informer against the molly house.” From that point forward, without saying a word to the other players, your new goal becomes the destruction of the molly house, and the reduction of all the other queer joy at the table.

“I really like hidden-role games,” Wehrle said. “But I also think hidden-role games fall into this problem because there’s too much certainty. When you’re playing a game of WerewolfYou know the number of werewolves that will be present in town based on the total player count. That just seems wrong.”

So, at the same time that Kelly’s design models the draconian legal framework being used against the historical mollies, it is also expanding and enhancing the traditional hidden-role mechanic found in Werewolf, Unfathomable (Battlestar GalacticaOther similar games.

“It’s had so many different iterations with so many different mechanics,” Kelly said, including a two-player head-to-head version that had one player taking on the role of the Society for the Reformation of Manners all by themselves.

“That didn’t really work,” Kelly said. “The story has always been the important part to me, and trying to find the right way to frame the tension between the joy on the one hand and the risk on the other hand, and the betrayal that can come out of those dynamics. That’s kind of been the driving force of the game.”

“These were not people who did this on a lark,” Wehrle said, speaking of the informants named in the historical record. “They were coerced, and I think it allows players to have a conversation about the different kinds of compromises that were presented to people in these positions. It can be hard. Frankly, [it’s]It’s possible that some conversations are too complex for every table. But we wanted it to be there for the ones that wanted to have that conversation.”

As BackerKit’s already-successful crowdfunding campaign grows, developers at Polygon tell us that this conversation will expand for all those who wish to participate. What’s the next step? Wehrle, as well as Katrina Marchant (who holds a Ph.D. in Early Modern Literature and Culture during the Reformation Period) will be hosting a sort of online bookclub to dig even further into this subject. This discussion will air on Twitch starting Nov. 7.

Crowdfunding is a great way to raise money for Molly HouseNow through November 10.