Review: Votes For Women

Few tabletop games have elicited quite such an outpouring of pissy man-baby angst in 2023 as Tory Brown’s debut title, Votes For Women. So what could it be about this otherwise solid, conventional even, looking board game that has lured so many dangers out of their basements and into the comments sections of game review sites? That is, sadly of course, a rhetorical question.

In Votes For Women you are looking to either ratify or reject the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. If passed this will, in theory, give women the right to vote. To secure victory each side must build support for their cause both in Congress, where the Amendment must first be passed, and in individual states, where its fate is ultimately decided.

Over the course of six turns, each player gets to deploy campaigners across the country and play cards representing changes in societal attitudes or historical events and figures that will see support for and against the amendment ebb and flow. By the end of turn six the Suffragist side must have both sent the Amendment to Congress and brought 36 states over to their cause, meanwhile the Opposition needs just 13 state holdouts to maintain the status quo.

A game can espouse the most righteous of causes and still be an absolute clunker but, irrespective of everything else, Votes For Women is in fact a very good game and it would be a disservice to Tory Brown if that simple fact got lost in the noise. Indeed it is a great, and rare, example of mechanics and theme working together in synergy as you try to build a consensus, pile up your little cubes and win states over to your side. The game also effectively hammers home how effecting change is often much harder than standing in its way and, with the Suffragist’s cubes divided between purple and yellow factions, models the difficulty of keeping these fragile coalitions together. 

Throughout the game makes great use of history, and Brown and Fort Circle Games have done a great job here with how that’s presented with the playing pieces, the game’s cards and the exemplary supplemental material, it really is a beautifully designed set. And whilst the game is entirely focused on the US I’ve personally long got used to living in their world, so learning about a few more of their lesser known bastards is not the hardest thing.

Talking of bastards some may have qualms about playing The Opposition,  in other games I’ve happily virus bombed entire worlds with nary a concern but it has to be said that dropping, for example, the 'White Supremacy And The Suffrage Movement' card does hit differently. Votes For Women doesn’t shy away from the ugliness of history, but then why should it, why should games aspire to be nothing more than just banal entertainment. Why deny them the power to hurt, to inform, to make us feel sad or angry that we allow the best films, literature, poetry and art?

But for all that Votes For Women is still a fun, exciting and ultimately very tense game. Will we break it out after the turkey’s been demolished this Christmas, probably not, but then I’m equally unlikely to suggest a Twilight Imperium marathon either, especially when I could be drunkenly hurling rubber burritos at appalled nieces and nephews. For all other occasions though Votes For Women remains a remarkable debut and one that we will happily return to again and again.

Game design: Tory Brown
Publisher: Fort Circle Games

This feature originally appeared in Wyrd Science Vol.1, Issue 5 (Dec '23)