To Have Fun in Spite of The Tragedy of It All: The Pertinence of Molly House

Molly House, a game by Jo Kelly and Cole Wehrle, stands out. It is a game about gender-defying mollies seeking safe spaces for self-expression, having a ruckus time and hiding from the English moral police, is being released at a perilous time for trans people in the United States. As just one example, the word “transgendered” being removed from the Stonewall Memorial website is an action as absurd as it is violent. It is an erasure meant to wipe history and people making them unseen. A cruel act that Molly House is the antithesis of.

Within this box a metaphor is contained, one of festive joy experienced by a collective in conservative Georgian England. Yet within the same game the Society for the Reformation of Manners will implicate you. You might snitch on your friends, and with each denunciation you snuff out joy from your community – anything to throw the charges out against you. This tension embeds this beautiful game with a – here is a word form the game’s time period – tenebrific bite. You are only as free as your society. How salient.

On top of this, Molly House as an artifact has luxurious packaging and presentation. High production values in modern games aren’t new, though the materials are increasing of higher quality, the overall aesthetic design seldom reaches anything other than looking Eurogame. Like other Wehrlegig games and Matilda Simonsson’s Pax Penning, Molly House is different. It demands attention regardless of one’s interest in board games. It invokes the time period it tries to depict. This game will be a centerpiece in many living rooms that adds glamour to even the dreariest space.

Molly House looks and feels like a parlor game, the one you play at a party before things get wild while you wait for more guests to arrive. Its production is inspired – everything from the box, pieces, and cards (most of which have unique art by Rachel Ford) as well as the theme all invoke a sense of refinement. This does a lot to immerse the player into the world of Georgian England and the rituals of the mollies.

I’ve followed Molly House closely since Kelly presented and worked on it in the Zenobia Awards, a competition in the tabletop industry looking to expand the diversity of designers and topics in historical board gaming. This is where Wehrle also first saw the game and became inclined to add it to the Werhelegig brand for how it fits the publisher’s inclination towards English themes.

I reached out to Kelly over email for this piece to ask their thoughts. We discussed working with Werhelegig, their broader ambitions for Molly House, and the perilous time at which the game is being released.

The interview has been edited for clarity.

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Why Molly House as a first design?

It was completely a product of circumstance. The first Zenobia Award was announced in late 2020, and as a musician unable to play gigs due to covid restrictions, the idea of taking on a big creative project to fill the void was really appealing to me. I’d tinkered around with game design in the past, but the framework of the award and attached mentoring scheme really helped me focus my effort and actually finish my first design.

What were some of the challenges you encountered trying to adopt the theme of mollies in 18th century England into a board game?

Entering the Zenobia Award led me to research games on queer topics, and the results were pretty disappointing, at least when looking for games taking their subjects seriously. I decided to take the opportunity to shine a light on a lesser-known corner of London’s past. Mollies, particularly in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, are interesting to me because they hint at a long and rich vein of queer history that connects to us over a span of 300 years. There were challenges around the presentation of identity in the game, particularly as a lot of the writing presents molly houses as the history of gay men, excluding any connections to trans history. Our aim was to meet the mollies on their own terms, presenting them as the diverse group they undoubtedly were, and where possible, referring to them by their “maiden names”, which they would have used to refer to each other within their community. The biggest mechanical challenge during development ended up being how to portray relationships and parties. It is easy to make these feel very dry or overly transactional, especially when using the vocabulary of wargames or economic euro games, and we ended up taking a step back from leaning on mechanisms to tell stories, leaving a lot of ambiguity for players to decide what certain parts of the games mean to them.

How was it working with Cole and Wehrlegig on Molly House?

It was way beyond any expectations I had when designing this game to have it published, let alone by a company I respect as much as Wehrlegig. I learned so much from working with Cole, from having him as a mentor throughout the Zenobia Award process to eventually collaborating with him and Drew on the final design. Cole and Drew have a paradoxical way of working slowly and deliberately, yet also somehow at breakneck speeds, and it was often challenging to keep up with them over different continents and timezones. The final product is a game that reflects my initial vision, but is also undoubtedly a Wehrlegig game.

Molly House does a great job of instilling the feel of a parlor game mixed with a classic board game like Monopoly. It also has some added complexity expected from modern board games. How did the design process change throughout from a simple card game to the finished game?

The game was demolished and rebuilt so many times over its development that it is hard to know where to start! The design itself has been very fluid from the outset, with individual mechanisms being much less important than the narrative of the game, which has remained almost unchanged from the beginning. I think this is part of the reason Wehrlegig took a chance on working with me, having seen that I wasn’t afraid to throw elements of the game away if they weren’t serving their purpose.

How does it feel that Molly House has been released in a time where the word transgender is being removed from the Stonewall moment website in New York City?

It is a stark reminder that progress is never linear. It is often assumed that the further you go into the past, the less accepting societies were of trans and queer people, but it is not nearly as simple as that. Princess Seraphina, a real historical figure who is depicted in the game, was a molly who presented as female in her day-to-day life and there is evidence of her being accepted as such by people outside the molly community. The early 18th century’s prevailing attitude was that identities, including gender, were mutable and could be transformed, but society changed, becoming much more rigid and sceptical of such ideas by the end of the century. History is full of pockets of queer and trans liberation, as well as a load of queer and trans oppression, and no progress that is made is ever permanent or irreversible. I hope Molly House can serve as a reminder of the constant need to fight for queer and trans rights.

What would you like players to take from it playing the game?

I would like them to experience a small part of what it was like to be queer 300 years ago, feeling out the similarities and the differences. To feel the agony of being blackmailed to betray their friends, or the thrill of defying their oppressors and spreading as much joy as possible while their life is on the line. To have fun in spite of the tragedy of it all.

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A press copy of Molly House was provided by Wehrlegig games.

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Luis Aguasvivas is a writer, researcher, and member of the New York Videogame Critics Circle. He covers game studies for PopMatters. Follow him on Bluesky and aguaspoints.com.