NOTE: This essay was originally posted as the first Design Diary on the Molly House Board Game Geek page. This essay refers to an older version of the game.
On October 17th, Drew and I will be bringing the next Wehrlegig crowdfunding project to BackerKit. The announcement of any campaign is always a moment of great excitement and great anxiety for us. No matter how many campaigns I work on, each one always offers fresh challenges. There is always just enough uncertainty to keep me up for at least a few nights wondering how it will all go.
This is especially true for our next game, Molly House. This game is somewhat a departure for us, and, for that reason, it deserves a bit of extra explanation. If you’re curious about the design’s longer history or are eager to learn about its specific game mechanisms and development, don’t worry. We will have other diaries which address those points, including many by the game’s primary designer, Jo Kelly. But for now, right at the start, I want to take a moment to talk about how we came to this project and why we decided to pursue it.
In early-2020, Volko Ruhnke and Harold Buchanan reached out to many people in the historical game publishing industry, myself included. They were mostly interested in what active steps could be taken to both widen the types of historical games that were being published and to expand the pool of designers to include talent from folks who were often poorly represented in historical gaming. These conversations informed the formation of the first Zenobia Award.
The Zenobia Award offered a twist on a standard game design competition. Its focus was trained on historical designs from underrepresented voices in an attempt to make the field more diverse and inclusive. Special attention was likewise given to games that covered obscure or neglected topics. But this was not the only thing that made the competition special. The contest also helped connect promising emerging designers with established professionals working in historical gaming. It was equal parts a completion, a mentorship program, and a community.
As you might imagine, it was a lot of work. Thankfully, the Award was well-served by dozens of volunteers who helped run the contest, organizing seminars, judging entries, and mentoring applicants. As part of that process, I helped mentor a small pod of designers, including the designer of Molly House.
Usually when I help new designers, I find that their efforts fall into two broad categories. Some designers come with a very firm idea of what their game should be like in their mind. Their prototypes are exceptionally thorough, and they have ready answers for pretty much any question I might ask them. When I make suggestions to this group, they generally don’t change much about their game. In some cases this is fine—after all, I would expect them to be experts about their own designs. But, most often, they are slow to make changes and recognize flaws in their work.
The second group is almost the complete opposite. Any suggestion given will precipitate a complete reworking of the entire design. Often this group is motivated by a desire to see their game finished and published as soon as possible, and they are willing to compromise pretty much any element of the game to make that possible.
Now there’s nothing necessarily wrong with either of these approaches. There are many brilliant games published each year by designers that I would class as members of these groups. But, in my little mentorship group, Jo Kelly was different.
Like the those in the second group, Jo never shied away from changing their game. But each dramatic iteration never seemed to depart from the central idea of their project. From my first meeting with them, I felt like I was dealing with a person who was caught in the gravity of a very powerful idea. They weren’t just trying to make a game that happened to be about molly houses in the early 18th century. They were trying to get at something very fundamental about that particular time and place and tension. Even as the various early iterations sputtered or spun-out, I couldn’t help but admire the focus of their work and their dedication to getting the story right.
Now, as a mentor and a judge, I couldn’t directly help my applicants with their games. I tried to be useful and make suggestions, but I didn’t want to serve as a developer or as a designer. Their success or failure in the contest had to be fully their own. And I’m proud to say that Jo navigated the contest very ably and managed to become a finalist in a very competitive field.
After the contest was over, I reached out to each member of my group and offered some publishing advice. But, with Jo I decided to make a tentative offer. I admired their ideas and their design practice greatly. If they wanted to work together, Drew and I would be interested in exploring the relationship.
I tried to be very clear about the tentativeness of this offer. This was a new kind of project for Drew and I. I had no idea how long it would take. I didn’t know what it would be like to work on another designer’s game. Would we end up just publishing the game as is? Would we offer development work? Would it grow into a larger collaboration or co-design? I didn’t know, and I wanted Jo to understand that this would likely not look like a traditional designer-publisher arrangement. To my delight, they decided to say yes.
This kicked off what has become a years-long collaboration. Eventually we settled into a rhythm where the design was passed between myself and Jo with Drew serving as a helpful developer and intermediary. As a rule, the only thing sacred in the design was the core story and a particular kind of feeling that we wanted to convey: Molly House was a game about the found queer communities of the early eighteenth century and how they created joy and kinship in impossible situations. It was also a game about how those communities were torn apart. Everything else had to work at the service of that. If a mechanism wasn’t working, it was dropped. The game at various times involved dice drafting, bag pulling and any number of other systems. At times it shrunk to be barely a card game and other times ballooned into a veritable Lacerta game. Through it all, we kept our eyes on that central idea and never hesitated to call each other out when the design drifted too far from its heart.
And we liked working together. I know that I can be a difficult, full-contact collaborator, but I found a good partner in Jo. We agreed about the really important stuff. We were patient with the process and tireless about the desire to make something really good. We also agreed that game mechanisms are simply narrative tools, not products, and that the best parts of the play experience come from the folks gathered around the table, not the systems on it, however clever they might be.
Then, this past June, we had a chance to meet in person. Drew and I flew out to the UKGE to scout out the show and meet some of our partners in the industry. For the first time we sat down with Jo in person and played through Molly House. And, to our surprise, it mostly worked. Well, to be honest, it didn’t work at all, at first. But in just a few hours time we did some rapid iteration and soon the design was earnestly firing. Within a few months, we had a stable game core (after perhaps two years of stumbling iteration—surely that can’t be right!). Drew and I took this design to Gen Con and showed it to more friends from the industry and suddenly it seemed like Molly House was going to happen.
Wehrlegig Games was not started as a traditional historical game publishing company. Really, I just wanted a way to get my historical games to market and have more control over their presentation. Over the past several years a real community has grown up around our games, and we want to share more games with that community. I can’t wait for you all to play Molly House, and I hope it is the first of many games like it.