Week of March 25th, 2025

Molly House, In the Shadows, War of the Ring: The Card Game — Fire & Swords, Unstoppable

After some minor drama with Amazon’s not-great fulfillment, Molly House finally arrived! There is a lot going on with the game so it’s too early to draw big conclusions like whether it truly succeeds in everything it’s trying to do, but here are some practical tips and first impressions.

It’s only modestly complicated, but it reminds me of a Friedemann Friese game — there is some process involved in some of the actions, and you need to get it right. Through diligence we got very close our first time through, but missed one rule which was’t ideal. The game is better played correctly. Like a lot of these more unique games, I think it pays to play it once solo 2- or 3-handed to get all the rules down before you try to teach anyone else. The first time you play, be very diligent about having multiple people walking through the aid sheets (which are very good) for your Festivities.

We finished our first (3-player) game in about 2.5hr, including teach. We were being super-methodical though, so I suspect the true playing time is more like 90min. However, I would budget 2-3hr for your first time through. It should move pretty briskly after that. The player aids are good and teaching the rules isn’t hard if you know what you’re doing. But if you don’t, it is.

I truly enjoyed the game. I’m always drawn to games that try to do something interesting and that are set in the real world, and Molly House is very strong in that respect. I love that it is, at its core, about community building. We have a million games about building physical infrastructure but not so many about human relationships, and far fewer which do that credibly. In Molly House you’re trying to throw these Festivities in which you are trying to self-aggrandize, yes, but you also need to strengthen the community you’re part of, and everything you do comes with some risk. If you can’t knit the community together, everyone loses. Everyone outside the community is suspicious, and inside everyone’s life is kind of messy. Some people may be looking at jail time and have to make some compromises, and some people may just be provocateurs. There is a very real sense of precariousness, that you may not be able to make this thing work because humans are going to human. Although the game is about the queer (the best word we have, even though it’s anachronistic) community in London in the 1700s, it could easily be about many misunderstood or marginalized or suspect or criminalized groups just trying to live their lives. The stakes don’t have to be as high as they are in the game for the whole situation to feel familiar.

As a brief aside on this, because of the possibility of becoming an informer and winning through selling out your fellow-players, it has been read as a so-called “social deduction” game. It’s really not. There are different ways to win, yes; if the community is infiltrated players who hedged by cooperating with the police may win. But everyone is responding to the same pressures and has the same choices. I generally find games like Werewolf, Battlestar Galactica, Dead of Winter, or Shadows over Camelot fundamentally uninteresting. This is not that. Likewise, I’ve seen it being read as a cooperative or semi-cooperative game. That’s not as wrong, but it’s really not that either. This is a far more interesting game which puts pressures on both the individual and the group while not being a true cooperative game.

At the end of the day, Molly House seems to me to be a delicately-balanced machine. Despite the simple melding engine of the Festivities, players are pushed in many directions at once. I respect what the game is doing enormously, but it’ll take time to see if it can succeed — if it can reliably generate that tension, that immersion after 10 games or more. This is Jo Kelly’s first significant published game, but obviously Cole Wehrle’s and Wehrlegig’s track record is rock-solid at this point so you have to be fairly optimistic. We’ll see. Regardless, this is the sort of game we absolutely need more of. A lot more.

As an addenda, it’s obviously impossible to talk about this game without thinking about the fact that a nontrivial percentage of the US population have absolutely lost their minds about trans people. The historical community in Molly House is not the same as today’s trans people, but obviously it feels very familiar and so I don’t know if a game has ever been this timely. Is it going to change any minds? It seems doubtful to me, unfortunately. The people who need to play it are not going to. However, I don’t think that is the standard. Persuasion is a long, slow, painful process. We can only do what we can do and realize the culture moves slowly, and powerful reactionary forces seem to object to people just living their lives. Public opinion in the US may have seemed to shift suddenly in the ‘00s on gay rights, but that was the culmination of decades of hard political work and community-building. Molly House is trying to do something admirable, to contextualize a group that is currently being severely persecuted in many parts of the US. That’s all we can ask. Some day the culture will all of a sudden change and it’ll seem like it happened overnight, but it’ll only be because people did the work and didn’t give up.

Somewhat randomly, I played GMT’s In the Shadows, a game about the French resistance during WWII. Very odd game. It’s nice in that’s it’s a quick-paced and 45 minutes. It’s very COIN-y: play cards which give you action points and events, select actions from different asymmetrical menus (actions which very much resemble sweep, assault, move, hide, and terror), and try not to screw up the action pre- and post-conditions. Despite short rules, in the long COIN tradition it’s very, very easy to get a few details wrong, but on the whole the play is approachable.

We played it once and the French got wiped out, switched sides and they got totally obliterated again, and then one more time where they again got crushed. Sharp-eyed observers may notice from the photo the rule we screwed up in the first game, but we corrected it after and it turned out to be small. None of our games were even remotely close. It seems if the Germans simply choose not to push on the resource extraction track at all until the last possible minute (denying the partisans access to any additional cells) it’s pretty easy to strangle the game. I felt like we had to be playing something wrong, but the only things I found would have made things worse.

Crippling balance problems are not necessarily fatal, but I just don’t see how this is supposed to be interesting in any event. It’s a lot of pushing tracks, hoping for lots of action points out of the deck, and using those points efficiently. I’m not clear a) why that is interesting, or b) why this is an interesting take on the French partisans during WWII. This has all been done to death with not particularly great results and I’ve really come to dread these games that use “advancing on tracks” as a core element. After playing Molly House, I think you could just paste a resistance theme on that game, rename the Festivities into Operations, and you’d have a much more engaging and evocative experience. We live in an era of Cole Wehrle, Reiner Knizia, Mark Simonitch, John D Clair, and Craig Besinque. You really need to do better than this.

Anyway, my impression was the game was just straight-up bad. You hate to come to that conclusion since obviously people put in some work and believed there was something here, but GMT has published a couple games recently that I’ve found myself wondering how on earth they ever got through playtesting (Prime Minister and Downfall). If we missed something and the balance situation is not as dire as it seemed to me, or if the solo game is interesting (my strong impression is that this is a solo game with a multiplayer mode bolted on), then maybe there is something here to pass the time at least? But I’d treat it with caution.

It’s taken me a surprising amount of time to get the Fire & Swords expansion for War of the Ring: The Card Game to the table! WotR:TCG has ended up largely supplanting the Quartermaster General games for me (with the exception of the excellent Cold War); it just feels like it’s in a better place in terms of accessibility than QMG: Victory or Death, the pacing is better than than the original QMG, and QMG:1914 (while great) is finicky. The Fire & Swords expansion really just makes the original game playable with 6. There is a minor new mechanic for skirmishes to get a few more lower-stakes battles into play and to make it more likely everyone has something to do at any given time, but otherwise it’s a few new factions (Dwarves, Easterlings, Northerners, Ruffians) and a few more cards for many of the existing factions to balance out the new deck configurations. The thing to watch out for is that it’s more sensitive to pacing. The QMG games, and WotR:TCG, are all well calibrated for their player count to keep the pacing and engagement levels reasonable. Adding two more players challenges this balance. For this reason I think you probably want to consider the expansion as being primarily for experienced players who can move at a brisk pace. Otherwise I think it’s just going to be too slow. War of the Ring: The Card Game is a really good game though, so if you have the group for it the expansion is hard not to recommend. You get a bunch of more obscure but evocative characters like Tom Bombadil, Glorfindel, Radagast, Ted Sandyman, and Bill the Pony. The fleshing out of the Southrons and the addition of the Easterlings makes the game feel more expansive, more epic. The Ruffians from the Scouring of the Shire bring in important thematic elements from the books. The Free Peoples additions are a bit less compelling but still nicely flavorful. While it’s more niche and will definitely be less frequently played than the core game for me, I like it and am glad to have it.

And, a couple of short takes …

The Burning Banners game for the week was a replay of Campaign 6 — The Spire of the Moon. This time things were very tight, with Lilith and the Army of the Night making early gains pressing south against the scattered and weaker Oathborn holdings there before turning north against the tougher defenses. The Army of the Night faces a really interesting tactical situation, needing to expand from their home base in all directions in order to win. The Oathborn are very tough on defense, and the pressure is on Lilith since she starts with a minimal economy and needs to expand it quickly to compete with the dwarves’ decent income. I’ve enjoyed most of the scenarios I’ve played here, but this one I’ve found particularly appealing.

We’ve also been continuing to enjoy the heck out of Unstoppable. I’ve now played all the characters and against all the different bosses in both solo and co-op mode, and have settled on hard mode being comfortably challenging for now. Like John D Clair’s other recent game Mistborn, Unstoppable seemed incredibly original when I first played it but has started to feel a bit more conventional as the deckbuilding tropes assert themselves in a different environment. As is virtually always the case, it’s not the novelty of the ideas that makes a game great, it’s quality of execution of those ideas, and Unstoppable is undeniably skillfully executed.

Grand Austria Hotel hit the table again. It grew on me, slightly surprisingly. It’s a totally abstract game and these days I find I need a bit more setting or thematic weight. I think the brisk pacing and obvious lightness of it is helpful, and there some fun sequences and combos. It may also have helped that I won, which I rarely do in this type of game for various reasons. Anyway, not exactly a recommendation, but if it came up again I wouldn’t veto it and that is not nothing.

Next Week

Civolution, and probably more Molly House.

Coda

Trust me, you really have not heard Camille Saint-Saëns Danse Macabre until you’ve listened to the original version for four bass clarinets.

That’s it! See you next week!