Turning London’s Queer Underground into a Game

In 2017 Wehrlegig Games released the first version of John Company, an interactive historical game based on the rise and fall of the British East India Company.

Players had to navigate the company’s world-spanning bureaucracy and the fallout of their actions in India. That game is in its second edition.

Now Wehrlegig Games is preparing to release Molly House, a game based on the lives of queer people in eighteenth-century London. This game has been in development for a few years, and its launch is more than funded through the crowdfunding site BackerKit.

The description on Board Game Geek says:

In Molly House, players take the roles of the gender-defying mollies of early eighteenth century London. Throw grand masquerades and cruise back alleys while evading moralistic constables who seek to destroy your community. Be careful, there may even be informers in your midst!

Over the course of an hour, players will draft hands of vice cards representing the different gestures, desires, and encounters that were frowned upon by the Society for the Reformation of Manners, a citizen group that sought to stamp out any behavior it deemed deviant in late 17th and early 18th century London. These cards allow players to host festivities with the help of their fellow mollies and create joy. But, those same cards can also lead players to be arrested and to the ultimate ruin of the molly house.

As players encounter the Society’s enforcers, they will often have to pay bribes or may be coerced into becoming informers for the Society. Informers must try desperately to undermine the community around Mother Clap’s Molly House without being discovered by their fellow mollies.

The description on Backerkit lays out how the game connects to historic developments:

The rapid growth of London in the late 17th century allowed for greater anonymity, and the increase in population gave access to a wider range of people, allowing queer people to congregate in burgeoning communities. Molly House is a game about how these communities formed and flourished even in the shadow of great persecution. It is an intimate game about the very idea of intimacy.

Molly House is also a game about policing. Here the primary policing actors are not city officials but instead a citizen group, the Society for the Reformation of Manners, which sought to weaponize the legal apparatus of the city in order to destroy a community it perceived as a threat. Critically, this goal could not have been accomplished without the intimidation and eventual compliance of a handful of informers, drawn from the ranks of the house’s patrons.

Lastly, Molly House is a game about the practice of history itself. So much of queer history has been lost: hidden, suppressed, or outright destroyed. But, the story of the molly houses of the eighteenth century was protected in the most unexpected of places. As witnesses were pulled before the authorities in London, they gave their testimony and their accounts were preserved in the proceedings of the Old Bailey (London’s central criminal court). 

Board Game Geek also offers perspectives on the development of the game by Cole Wehrle, co-founder of the company, and Jo Kelly, the primary designer.

I don’t play board games often, especially these more esoteric games. And the culture of developing those games is even more fascinatingly foreign, with its own vocabulary and traditions. Like period fiction, dramas on stage and screen, and video games, well designed board games and role-playing games offer unique ways to explore the dramas and contingencies of history.