Votes for Women, one of the year’s best board games, belongs in a museum

Vote for women is an elegant strategy board game that rewards insight into American history with exceptional gameplay. It carries the rich card-driven mechanics of modern classics like Twilight battle And Labyrinth: The War on Terror, but in a much more digestible format. Vocal anticipation of the gaming community for Fort Circle games‘ second release is fully validated. It’s clear that Vote for women is a template for how historical strategy games should be presented to a modern audience hungry for new experiences at the table.

A card-driven strategy game is a relatively new format in the world of tabletop gaming. The genre gained prominence with Twilight battle, co-designed by Ananda Gupta and Jason Matthews and first released in 2005. In that game, players took on the role of either the United States or the former Soviet Union, playing cards that represented historical figures and events. By essentially mixing things like the Cuban Missile Crisis and the post-war Arab-Israeli conflict into a top hat, Twilight battle gave players fine control over the most subtle levers of political power. That’s how the game occupied the top spot on the niche board game bulletin board and aggregator Board Game Geek for so many years (until the advent of Gloomhaventhat is).

Vote for women pits the suffragists against the opposition in the struggle to give women the right to vote. The goal of suffragists is to first get the US Congress to propose the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution and then secure its ratification in no fewer than 36 states. The opposition must either prevent the 19th Amendment from being proposed or convince at least 13 states to reject it. The game rolls back and forth over six rounds over one Riskstyle map of the US, with powerful maps based on historical figures and events on each side.

The cards each have unique powers. In the early game, a Union victory in the American Civil War can give suffragists much-needed organizational momentum. Meanwhile, cards like Red Scare can reduce the group’s political power in multiple states in the later rounds. Throughout the game, powerful historical figures such as President Woodrow Wilson or Suffragist Ida B. Wells-Barnett provide powerful advantages in the form of regional support and increased organizational power. The game randomly generates cards for each player, meaning no two games will ever feature the same mix of people or events.

Vote for women casually uses the most famous historical figures and events for its big, swinging moments. But where it really excels is weaving smaller, lesser-known figures into the mix alongside even bigger political movements. Among them is the temperance movement, which led to the passage of the 18th Amendment and the Prohibition era, but also World War I and the growing power of conservative and religious legislators during the Industrial Revolution. It also does not shy away from emphasizing how the politics of race and class played a major role in the decades-long battle for the vote.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygoon

But without the context of historical advisor and professor Rachel Michelle Gunter, the excellent work of game designer Tory Brown and developer Kevin Bertram wouldn’t be nearly as impressive. Gunter’s touch is evident on nearly every part, from the choice quotes and annotations on each individual card to the seven-page Historical supplement and notes by the designer booklet that comes with it. Fort Circle has even gone so far as to include 14 archival documents in the box. While these full-scale reproductions aren’t gameplay components per se, I found them invaluable in deciphering the game’s more subtle interactions.

The box even includes a set of concise, easy-to-understand instructions that fit on just 11 pages. It’s a far cry from the more traditional games in the card-driven genre, which can look more like a series of United States Army PowerPoint slides than a modern board game manual. Another nod to modernity, it also features rules for one-on-one competitive play, as well as solo and co-op play against a card-driven bot.

Vote for women is available now for $75 through the Fort Circle online store. Expect it to be mentioned all year long and well into the next as it’s one of the very best new games coming out this year. This is not just a game for the home, but one that deserves a place in schools, local libraries, and anywhere history can be contemplated and served.