Georgian England saw London quickly growing into one of the largest cities in Europe. As the city grew, coffee houses equally gained importance in society. For a mere penny, customers could purchase a cup of coffee and gain admission to these new spaces where they could learn the news of the day and perhaps meet other local residents and discuss mutual concerns. At the same time, some of these establishments were the birthplace of a new community. They became a place where people could explore gender and sexuality among like-minded people and this place became known as a Molly House by Jo Kelly and Cole Wehrle from Wehrlegig Games with art by Rachel Ford.
Joy, Life and Death
The rulebook’s introduction does a great job of setting the scene for this game about the fragility, struggles and joy found in the queer community of 18th-century London. As players, you are part of the community. You are Mollies, a slang term that describes effeminate, usually gay men. You want to throw festivities that grow the community while also offering everyone in attendance an absolutely fantastic time.
At the same time, you have to be very careful. The Society for the Reformation of Manners and their constables and rogues are a constant threat that you have to learn to deal with in clever ways. If you are ever discovered, you risk being hanged. In fact, that’s one of the possible outcomes of Molly House. If the game ends because the community has been infiltrated, all players are hanged, as the rulebook puts it. So, no, you don’t just lose. You actually lose your life.
Of course, if you decide to become an informant and are able to successfully inform on a Molly House, you keep your life. If there are multiple successful informants, they tot up their points based on how well they informed on the queer community and whoever has the most points win. However, that victory is bittersweet, because you are responsible for the death of your fellow players.
The other possibility is that the community averts being discovered, but it just doesn’t thrive and fades away. In that case, all players lose. They live, but they don’t win the game.
The best outcome is for the community to gain enough joy to survive and thrive. In that case, the player with the most joy wins.
Competitive Cooperation
I think you can already tell that Molly House is different. The three end-game conditions themselves tell a story. They convey the history of the Mollies and their struggles. From the outset, players know that the game is against them, just like the society as a whole, and the Society for the Reformation of Manners in particular, was against the queer community in Georgian England.
The game doesn’t stop there. It also sets Mollies against each other in their struggle to be themselves and to feel joy. For the community to survive, its joy tracker must reach a certain threshold, based on player count, and to increase the community’s joy, the players, the Mollies, have to throw festivities in which they take a step back and sacrifice some of their own joy for that of the community.
Throwing festivities is a matter of playing cards from your hand and from the community to create certain combinations. The cards come in four suits, or colours. In each suit, there are numbered cards, as well as a queen, a jack, a constable and a rogue. Four of the played cards are chosen to make up the highest-ranking set possible. The more of the chosen cards are cards played from the community deck, the quicker the community’s joy goes up.
So you try to play your own cards to ensure the community cards become part of the set, but you also need to make sure you score yourself. Getting that balance right isn’t easy. Additionally, other players also want to score. Everyone is vying for points, but if everyone is too selfish, nobody will win. Molly House tells another part of the queer community’s story here, showing how someone’s vanity doesn’t benefit the whole community.
Constables and Rogues Having a Ball
In fact, the way Molly House conveys the history is mostly through the cards. As cards are drawn and played, some are discarded onto the so-called evidence pile. If too many threat cards, constables or rogues, make it there, the more likely that one or more of the Molly Houses are raided, which is a bad thing for the community, of course.
However, as players, you have some control. You can intentionally play these threat cards into a festivity to neutralise them. Rogues can be played as wildcards of any numeric value and if they end up as part of the final four cards, they get into the safe pile. It is as if these potential informants came to the party and had such a great time that they went home so happy and elated that they forgot to file their report on the illegal activities.
Similarly, constables count as zeros, and there is a set, which consists of the lowest four cards. So if you manage to play four constables into a festivity, they also end up on the safe pile. While that doesn’t help the community increase their joy as such, it can save it from being infiltrated and everyone getting hanged. It’s as if the Mollies decided to stay hidden during the constables’ visit and pretend that their establishment was just a normal coffee house like any other. Without seeing any evidence of illicit behaviour, the constables have no choice but to leave empty-handed.
It will take a few games of Molly House to realize just how many of its mechanisms tell the story of the queer community. It’s quite subtle until you see it. Then you can’t play without thinking about the poor constables having a quiet coffee and leaving without anything to do.
Right in the Middle of a Molly House
It’s really amazing how the game puts players right in the middle of it all. Everyone sets out with the best intentions to help the queer community survive and thrive. Yet, as one Molly House after another is raided and closed down, the threat to your own victory, to your life, becomes ever greater. After every raid, you are forced to secretly choose between being loyal or an informant.
It’s so very tempting to turn your back on the community and drop a few pieces of evidence here and there. Informing on your community and fellow queers means you save your own skin. You won’t be dangling from the gallows and will probably be spared prison. Additionally, if the community still survives, despite your actions, you are in a stronger position.
However, when you spread rumours, you don’t just affect a person’s position in society. No, you issue their death sentence. Whether you, as the player, can live with yourself afterwards is something only you can decide.
The thing is, Molly House doesn’t ram these ethical decisions down players’ throats. While the rulebook makes it quite clear from the start what is at stake, as you play, there isn’t really anything particular that pokes at your moral compass. You never get reminded about the ethical choices you make. It’s all very subtle until you realise what’s happening.
Yet, winning with the most joy, as the victory points are called in Molly House, when the community thrives, is so much more satisfying than winning as a successful informer. Winning as an informer is like winning Pandemic by spreading the virus and killing everyone, instead of helping to save the world.
Too Much Luck, Not Enough Control
Unfortunately, some people complain that Molly House feels a bit overly complicated with too many exceptions. They say that the card luck makes it impossible to fully control the outcome of festivities and that the randomness of the dice makes it very tough to prevent threats from ending up on the evidence pile.
That’s all true, but at the same time, that’s the whole point of Molly House. Once you understand what the game emulates, the rules become very clear and it all makes perfect sense.
No, you can’t control festivities completely. The cards you draw from the community deck are random. It’s like when people turn up to your party who weren’t invited. Your plan to throw the highest-scoring festivity may have to go out the window along with your ambitions. Such is life. The point is, seeing people join the community and have fun is more important than you scoring all the joy yourself.
If the dice roll the wrong way, threat cards end up in the evidence pile and Molly Houses get raided. It’s bad luck. The thing is, it’s as unpredictable as it would have been for the queer community to know when or where the next constable or rogue turned up.
The seemingly complex rules with too many exceptions are actually very clear and completely intuitive once you realise what they emulate. Of course, threats go into the safe pile if they’re part of the final four cards chosen after a festivity. That makes sense, because they had a good time or the party was very quiet not giving the constables any evidence to take away.
So if you want a highly strategic game where everyone is fully in control of their own actions and decisions, then Molly House isn’t for you.
Molly House: A Mad Mix of Mechanisms
The thing is, Molly House is something very different, something a lot more than just a game.
Cole Wehrle’s alchemical expertise to mix roll-to-move, card drafting, hand management, set collection and even social deduction has created a coherent game. Just like the mad mix of mechanisms worked so well in Arcs, it works even better in Molly House.
Molly House is, like Oath, a game that’s about the story it tells and the decisions players make, rather than winning the game as such, even though that’s what you’re desperately trying to do. The game asks you to face very similarly difficult choices to those that the queer community had in Georgian London, but without the threat of a death sentence.
Yet, Molly House is completely unlike both of these games. What Jo Kelly has imagined into life is very special and extremely meaningful, both as a game as well as a piece of historical non-fiction work. It’s a way of experiencing history as if it were here and now.
Molly House is a game that gives you many tactical, not strategic, choices, where players have to work together to make the community succeed, while being clever enough to give themselves the extra joy they need to win and while being able to take the right risks to neutralise potential threats at the right time. It’s a game where you need to think on your feet and hide your real self for most of the time until you can finally put your hair up in curls, dress in your finest dresses and well… basically let your hair down, to use a modern term.
Molly House is perfect in every way. It’s an amazing game that will long live in my collection and even more so in my heart.
Useful Links
Videos
Transparency Facts
I feel that this review reflects my own, independent and honest opinion, but the facts below allow you to decide whether you think that I was influenced in any way.
- I bought and paid for the game myself.
- At the time of writing, I have not received financial support from the publisher or anyone working on their behalf.
Audio Version
Intro Music: Bomber (Sting) by Riot (https://www.
Music: Sarabande, Suite No. 4 in D minor, arranged for strings by George Frideric Händel from Classicals.de
Music: Cinematic Trailer Music 02, Cinematic Orchestral Action Trailer by Gregor Quendel from Classicals.de
Muisc: Cinematic Trailer Music 05, Cinematic Cello Arpeggio Trailer by Gregor Quendel from Classicals.de
Playlist
These are the songs I listened to while I was writing this review:
