In Molly House, players compete for queer joy against a backdrop of hate in 18th-century England

02.11.2023 - 17:35 / polygon.com

After more than a decade of unprecedented growth, the audience for tabletop games keeps getting more diverse. So too is the subject matter of popular games, which increasingly include environmental and even social themes. 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. In 2021, a blue-ribbon panel of industry experts decided to do what they could to change that. As a result, the Zenobia Award was born.

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. But the real gift was the promise of mentorship from those same judges. Now one of the most outstanding and daring board game pitches made during the event will be brought to life soon thanks to a successful BackerKit crowdfunding campaign. Polygon recently sat down with the team behind Molly House, a hidden-role game set among the queer community in 18th-century England, to learn more.

Molly houses were a dazzling feature of 18th-century England, a cross between a tavern and a French salon where the queer community of the day would gather to socialize and celebrate. But thanks to the bigoted court system of that time period, the owners of the molly houses and their patrons were demonized and, ultimately, prosecuted in court.

“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. So you have characters like Princess Seraphina, Miss Kitten, Garter Mary. [...] 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.”

An organized backlash in the form of a kind of proto-police force known as the Society of the Reformation of Manners eventually organized a series of litigious interventions that drove molly houses deep underground, eventually eliminating them from Britain entirely. 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 & Exile) has become fascinated.

“Queer history is subject to routine