Putting It All Together

NOTE: This essay was originally posted as the fifth Design Diary on the Molly House Board Game Geek page. This essay refers to an older version of the game. 

Last week, I wrote about the many twists and turns the design of Molly House took over the course of its development. Like any development, even the most frustrating delays and detours are productive moments. This is because the moments where we were most unhappy with a design were also moments of clarity. Slowly but surely you can sketch out the shape up something by deciding what it is not.

Today, I want to talk about what Molly House is. This entry will essentially serve less as a design entry and more of a tour through the design. While I won’t be able to teach you every rule in the game, I hope that this entry will give you a sense of what it is like to play the game, its key mechanical systems and, perhaps, some sense of why the game is the way it is. Like our previous projects, we’ll certainly be sharing the game’s rules and a playtesting kit for the game over the course of the campaign.

However, unlike previous projects, we’re not going to share everything all at once. We’re doing this for a couple reasons. The first is logistical. Drew and I happen to be traveling right after we launch the game, and we won’t be able to provide the level of support folks rightly expect for things like rules questions or odd playtesting kit problems. The second reason is that we wanted to try something a little different with this campaign. We know that the games we work on are really just part of a broader experience that includes learning more about the period and the history of the design itself. So, we’ll be launching the game with some interesting background readings so that folks can learn a bit about the history before they play the game. Then, after a few days, we'll release the rules and the playtesting kits in a variety of formats shortly thereafter.

But, if you’re curious about how the game works, don’t worry, this designer diary is for you.

Part 1: You and Your Desires

Players take the role of participants of London’s vibrant queer underground in the 1720s. While any kind of gender-defying behavior was frowned upon by a sizable proportion of the city and persecuted outright by citizen groups such as the Society for the Reformation of Manners, players were nonetheless able to find community in a string of establishments known as molly houses, which served as shelters and community hubs. The game revolves around one such molly house known as Mother Clap’s.

During the game, you will gradually acquire cards from the vice deck. Cards in the vice deck fall into several categories: desires, festivities, mollies, and constables.

Many cards come in one of four suits: hearts, pentacles, cups, and fans. These suits are meant to signify categories of desire. Festivities do not have a suit.

Desire cards are numbered from 1 to 9. The number indicates the magnitude of the desire. The higher cards are, generally, riskier to hold. They also are harder to score. Desire cards also have a number of stars, signifying the joy that might be gained if the desire is fulfilled. Joy roughly corresponds to a card’s value, the higher the number on a card the more joy might be earned from it.

Festivity and molly cards are used to run parties. More on that later.

Finally, there are constable cards. There are two constables of each suit and all 8 are mixed in the general vice deck. Over the course of play, they will be drawn from the deck. When a constable is drawn, they will scour the board, looking for the player with the highest value of the matching suit. Normally players only need to reveal their single highest card of the constable’s suit. But, when the second is drawn, players must reveal all cards that match the constable.

The player with the highest sum of those cards will be arrested. This player must make a choice. They can sacrifice all of their matching cards or they can take guilt tokens equal to the number of matching cards. In the process of dealing with constables, they may decide to secretly become an informer.

Becoming an informer dramatically changes your victory condition. A game of Molly House ends in one of two ways. Either the Mother Clap’s remains open or it has been raided. If it is open, all informers immediately lose the game. However, if the house has been raided, all players who are not informers are captured by the authorities and cannot win the game. Once you become an informer, you cannot change back!

Part 2: Flow of Play

A game of Molly House occurs over several game turns, called weeks (in reality they are closer to years, but that’s an issue for another designer diary!). The game ends either after the 4th week or after the molly house has been raided. Every week starts with action rounds. After that, players score their reputation based on the shifting fashions of the molly house. Then, players reveal the gossip pile and check to see if the house has been raided. Finally, players clean up the board and prepare the game for the next week.

Action rounds are fairly straightforward. Each player has a pawn on the map. That pawn may move up to two spaces on the board and then may take the action associated with their space. Players are welcome to share the same space with other players and move freely on the board. However, you cannot enter a space if the patrol marker is there. The patrol marker moves around as players are arrested and is there mostly to provide a little bit of spatial texture to the board.

Let’s take a look at a couple of actions. One of the simplest actions is Covent Garden. With this action you will take a card from the market display into your player area and then draw a card to replace it. You may repeat this action if you wish. Critically, if you reveal a constable when refilling the market, your turn ends and the constable must be resolved. This is the case anytime a constable is drawn, so watch out for actions that require you to draw a bunch of cards; your turn may end before you get a chance to draw all of the cards you were owed!

For our second action, let’s look at courting a molly. Five of the spaces on the edge of the map are neighborhoods. These are places where you can take the courtship action if there is a molly in the attached slot. Molly cards work a little differently then regular cards. After they are used in parties, instead of getting discarded, they go back home, traveling to the slots associated with the neighborhoods. Once there, players can use the courtship action to take them in their hand. In order to do this, they have to reveal a number of cards from their hand equal to the requirement on the location. After they do this, they take the molly card into their hand. Be careful however, because after you gain the molly, you must trash (draw and discard) a number of cards from vice deck equal to the number of cards you played. This is a common way constables get triggered!

Part 3: Parties!

Most of the actions in Molly House are very simple and are resolved in just a few seconds. There is one exception to this, and that’s the molly house action that lies at the heart of the game.

When a player triggers this action, they must play a molly from their hand. This molly will set the terms for the parties success. For instance, Princess Seraphina’s condition is two pairs. Then, clockwise from the starting player, each player may play a card or pass. This continues until all player have decided to pass. By playing cards, players are essentially contributing to a single “poker hand” in an effort to fulfill the requirement collectively.

At the end of the festivity, you’ll check to see if the party’s goal was met. On a success, players will score joy, whereas a failure will lead to cards being returned to your hand. In either case, cards will then be drawn from the deck. This means that you might find yourself caught by a constable. Parties are places where a player’s position is most exposed, so you’ll need to be careful about which cards you shared.

When a party is successful, any cards which contributed to success are tucked partially under the player’s player board in something called their “reputation stack.” This stack of cards is still active for constable checks, but it will score additional points depending on the shifting fashion of the house. You will also get to save these cards for your next turn.

However, not all cards that could be picked are picked. In Molly House, discretion is key. If multiple cards could form a winning set only the lowest valued cards are chosen. (If there are additional ties, there’s a suit priority system to sort that out). Any card that was played at a successful party but not chosen is added to the gossip pile, which we’ll talk about in the next section.

The final element of parties, is that players can also modify them with festivity cards, which have the power to change the way they are resolved or introduce more scoring opportunities. Together with the mollies, these cards create a dizzying number of opportunities and challenges, even for a seasoned party-goer.

Part 4: Gossip, House Closure, and Informants

Finally, we should talk a little about house closure. In Molly House, the game ends if the house is raided. Raids occur when a marker advances to the last space of the aptly named House Raid track. Mostly, the raid track moves around during the Gossip phase of the game. At various points players will add cards to the gossip pile throughout the week. If their desires went unrequited at a party, that card becomes a gossip card. Or, if they were caught out in the streets when the round ended, a random portion of the cards in their hand will get tossed into the gossip. (This can be avoided by going home early!).

During the gossip phase, all of these cards are shuffled and then used to fill any empty slots in market spaces and the like. Then, the remainder are revealed. Cards of high value (4+) advance the raid track one space to the right. All other cards lower it. Players should determine the difference between these two types of cards and then make the appropriate shift.

Remember, informer players can only win if the house is closed, so they will generally have an interest in getting their high cards into the gossip pile one way or another. But, a perfectly innocent player might also contribute to a problem. If you go to a party hoping to find someone to match your high value card, you might find yourself suddenly adding a very dangerous card to the gossip pile. Were you an informer, hoping to bait tempt the other players to reveal those high cards or were you just an innocent who got over their head? It’ll be up to other players to decide!

One key advantage of being an informer is that you don’t have to follow the core rules of the game. Unlike other players, you are never required to reveal matching cards from your hand with a constable is triggered. This means you can often dodge arrests. But, don’t be too obvious.

Your identity as an informer is both secret and in plain sight. Over the course of the game, when you encounter constables, you’ll often end up taking a number of guilt tokens which will lower your score at the end of the game. These guilt tokens are stored in no more than 4 stacks on your player board. While drawing guilt tokens, you’ll sometimes draw Informer tokens. You are always welcome to reveal and discard these tokens. However, at these moments you can also decide to take one so long as you do not currently have a guilt token. The moment you do this, you become an informer.

Being an informer can be a very precarious thing! If a player suspects you, they can visit your space on the map and accuse you, forcing you to reveal one stack of your guilt tokens—taking any scoring penalty at that moment and potentially revealing you. If you are revealed, you must play the remainder of the game as a Known Informer and can only participate in activities at the Molly House if the party runner invites you. This can make it a lot harder to undermine the house! Still, there are situations where players may want to collaborate with you to throw a party.

Conclusion

And that’s basically the game! I didn’t cover every action or a lot of the specific steps around festivity resolution, but if you made it this far you should have a good sense of how the game plays. With Molly House, we’ve tried to build something that is lighter than Pamir in terms of its mechanical complexity, but which still offers players a lot to think about. We’re finding games generally take around hour (though perhaps twice that for new players), and that it scales fairly well between all player counts. And, like our other games, we will feature a solo mode designed by Ricky from Box of Delights.

There’s so much more to talk about, but we’ll have to save that for another time. Hopefully we’ll see you tomorrow for the big launch!