Games
How to resolve AdBlock issue? 
Fascinating for theme and style, but maybe too cumbersome mechanically.
I appreciate the idea of taking risks in design. There are any number of games that just do X thing without any real innovative or inventive approach to what they're doing. They're a deckbuilder or an engine builder or worker placement or a war game. They vary in theme and sometimes there's a little wrinkle in that basic structure that makes them more (or less) appealing than others of their ilk, but it's relatively rare in this, our glutted universe of board games. There's also something to be said for taking risks in terms of theme. We can have any number of battles vs alien monsters or building cities or following the paths of peoples through history. And we have them. Many of them. But sometimes it's more interesting to take a moment in time and focus on one small area or group within that time and see just what can be explored. Both of those paths less followed are the province of Wehrlegig's latest release, Molly House.
Set in 18th and 19th-century London, when being of different sexuality was scorned by "proper" society and usually illegal (including punishments all the way up to hanging), Molly House tries to give us a look into the social lives of the mollies, contemporary slang for men who were gay or transexual. Given the current political situation in the United States, where the Nazis in power are only too happy to try to replicate in modern times the lives of danger and trepidation that these men led, it's not only a gander at a not-often-examined cultural moment in history but also a call, as good histories so often are, to awareness of what is happening outside our doors at this very moment.
As you can tell, I'm fascinated by the theme, not just for it being a departure from the bog-standards, but because it's an interesting insight into just what might inspire someone to create a game. Co-designer, Jo Kelly, submitted the initial model to the Zenobia Awards in 2021 and, while it didn't win a place, it caught the attention of noted English historian and game designer, Cole Wehrle. He offered to help them develop it at Wehrlegig and eventually contributed enough to gain a co-designer credit with Jo. Cole is famous/notorious for some of the complexities and odd mechanical approaches of many of his games, such that they're often best played with the same group and repeatedly, so that everyone at the table is at the same level, as it were. Molly House might have some of that, but the pastiche of rules that create its structure make me question whether it has the depth of a Root or a Pax Pamir. But I can't say that for certain because, well, it's hard to tell.
Molly House has one major thing going for it at a mechanical level, in that it's a semi-cooperative game. The object is to have the most Joy (essentially victory points) before one of multiple endings/victory conditions emerges. However, everyone must cooperate to ensure that the community also achieves a certain level of Joy or (almost) everyone will lose (usually.) Joy is generated by throwing parties and those parties are emulated by players putting cards into a central pool, out of which the thrower of said party will try to get the best result. There are four suits of cards, one for each of four famous molly houses that London used to have, and the parties are represented by what are essentially poker hands (a straight, four of a kind, a straight flush, etc.) So players do have to cooperate, both for their own benefit and for that of the community as a whole. But the opportunity to play (or not) cards is rife with personal opportunity. You might take the moment to toss in a Rogue of the appropriate suit in the hopes that it will end up in the Safe pile and get it out of your hand, as you don't want it there at the end of the week (round), but there's a chance it won't get selected after all and it will end up in the Gossip pile, which could have deleterious effects for you and/or the community as a whole.
And those effects are tailored to each individual appearance of not just every card, but every type of card, as well. And here's where it begins to lose a little of its shine. See, if you get Exposed (usually by watching a Threat card (Rogues, Constables) go into the Gossip pile), whoever has the most reputation with that suit (and, thus, that molly house) will lose all of the cards that they have of that suit but gain cubes to note that they're still well-known. At that point, it's just the raw number of cards/cubes you have that determines reputation. But in another instance where you've been exposed by either the authorities or the Society for the Reformation of Manners, it's the total value of those cards that you have that marks you. At some points, cards go into that Safe pile. But at other seemingly quite similar points, they go into the Gossip pile. Through multiple plays of the game, we are still constantly checking the rulebook to make sure that we're following the mechanisms correctly. That rulebook isn't dense with information, but the variations on where cards end up and how they're valued are so slight that it's easy to lose track of what you're supposed to be doing at any given point and pretty difficult to backtrack if you do realize you've been doing it wrong (again.) It's at that point that the theme suddenly begins to take a back seat to simply trying to get it right.
Now, I am a devoted Cole fan, so I am both accustomed to and a supporter of his (and, in this case, Jo's) interesting deviations from what might seem typical in design. But this game occasionally seems to be more trouble than it's worth. I'm missing the strange interlacing of the Root factions or the far-reaching strategy of Arcs or the little gradations of choice in Pax Pamir. I think those elements may still be there, but it feels like they're lost amidst the constant need to follow what seem to be overwrought mechanisms hung on a fairly simple framework. In other words, I think there might be too much game here for what it seems to be intent on accomplishing and I haven't even gotten into the Informant rules, which have actually come into play exactly once in our several plays of the game. Those, of course, bring in a whole host of tiny variations to circumstances themselves, most of them revolving around end of game scoring. I hang out with a bunch of hardcore gamers (and big fans of things like John Company) and none of them have yet expressed a thought about whether it would ever have been valuable to engage those Informant rules and try to steal a win from the rest of us; mostly because it's hard to keep track of just when that kind of move would be useful.
One thing that has to be noted is that, as with all Wehrlegig productions, the visual design and presentation is spectacular. Rachel Ford's artwork is redolent with the style of Georgian England, all of the cards have names of people who were part of the actual molly house community in the historical record, and the color scheme, from the player pawns to the box, is right in tune with everything you'd expect from the theme that you've been handed. On that note, as with other games like John Company, the rules, opaque as they can often be, do follow the theme in that you stand to gain more in terms of Joy (and personal glory) by having a big repuation with Mother Clap's house, but you also run the risk of suffering badly in the end (game) for being well-known not just among the mollies, but to the people who were (and are) determined to ruin the fun for everyone.
I'm not abandoning the game. I am interested in continuing to try to figure out what depth it may or may not have (and to play a session without consulting the rules five times) but I don't find myself compelled to play in the same way I do with most of Cole's other works. I think often of an interview that he and Patrick Leder did where he expressed their philosophy that "We're trying to make someone's favorite game, not everyone's." I think that's a really sound approach and it may just be that Molly House is not going to be the game for me, which is perfectly fine. I'll still appreciate the time I spent with it and can say that I'll tacitly recommend it to at least a few gamers that I know. It's just different, that's all.
