I’ve really struggled with this one.
I wanted to review Votes for Women months ago, soon after I first got my copy. It took me a little while to get it to the table, but it was top of my list, just waiting for the right moment. I thought I’d have reviewed it by now, but I haven’t. It’s not that the game isn’t good. The game is really quite good. It’s a polished and beautifully presented card driven game (CDG) about an important movement in American history that is approachable without sacrificing interesting decisions or strategy. By nearly any metric it is a roaring success of game design and development. A great entry point into the hobby and something worth trying for any fan of CDGs.
The problem is, I don’t love it.
I don’t know why I’m not in love with Votes for Women. I can see the excellence in its design, and I vastly prefer lighter CDGs to their heavier counterparts. Votes for Women really centers its cards in the gameplay experience and the limited actions available when you discard a card, as opposed to playing it for its event, are easy to remember. The solo bot is very easy to learn, even for the solo-bot challenged like myself, and offers a satisfying opponent to play against that doesn’t get bogged down in minutiae. The rules are gloriously simple, I don’t think I’ve ever played a historical game with such an easy onboarding process to get you set up and playing – that alone is worthy of study by game designers and developers. But still, for all my admiration, it doesn’t strike joy within me. I played it a few times, and then it sat on my shelf waiting for me to try it again. I have played Fort Circle’s other game, The Shores of Tripoli, so many times but my plays of Votes for Women remain in the single digits.
It's not that I can’t see the systems at work in Votes for Women, and I admire them ardently. The bidding for cards at the start of the round adds a lovely little spice of auction games into a type of game that tends to eschew those kinds of mechanisms. The State cards provide a great strategic guide when you’re learning the game and do wonders to reduce the wide-open canvas of the United States into some more focused battlegrounds. The way the game shows the divisions within the suffrage movement, both with its multiple colored pieces and via event cards, is magnificent and represents a deeper relationship to the history than I have seen in games of much greater complexity. The decision space around when to pass the nineteenth amendment is tense, and the asymmetric victory conditions – determined by the U.S. Constitution but wisely chosen for the game – allow for the Suffragette player to feel like they are achieving more each turn while suffering a constant tension about whether it will be enough to meet the draconian standards of U.S. law. It’s all so well thought out and executed that I struggle to find fault with it. But I just don’t love it.
The production is so nice, excellent understanding of the way in which games are also physical objects and the importance in making them enjoyable to manipulate.
This is going to be a weird review, and kind of not a review. I have ultimately decided not to keep Votes for Women and I’m going to explore the reasons why. I don’t expect them to be particularly useful for deciding whether you yourself should buy or play Votes for Women. For the record, I think the answer to both is probably yes – if you are interested in this game, you should play it. At the time of writing, it has just been posted on the website Rally the Troops, so you can try it for free via the best digital implementation out there. Even though I have failed to click with it the way I had hoped, I’m so glad I played it and I’m even happier that this game exists, and that other people are in love with it. It’s a good thing for the hobby, and it may be a good thing for you, but I don’t think it is good enough to me for it to live on my shelf.
A bit of context, maybe. I live in a small European home in the south of Ireland. My shelf space is limited. I also believe that games should be played – I have no grudge against collectors and, in fact, given infinite space and money I probably would be quite the obsessive one, but I would rather a game be played with than have it sit forsaken and forgotten on my shelf. So, whenever I decide about whether to keep a game, I must balance my space against my desire that games, especially good games, be with people who will play and enjoy them rather than living with me as part of a dragon’s hoard that is worryingly susceptible to the local damp climate.
There are reasons I might choose to keep a game – and Votes for Women has a strong case to be kept. It is a simple introductory game about women’s suffrage in America. I have a four-year-old daughter who I very much would like to introduce to board games and engender a healthy interest in the past. A game like Votes for Women is ideally situated for that purpose. However, there are a few drawbacks. For one thing, while Votes for Women is very simple, it’s not “playable with a four-year-old” simple. I would be waiting a while. Another factor is that while I am American, my daughter kind of isn’t – she is half-American but she’s also half-Irish and lives in Ireland. I could cling to Votes for Women in hopes that it’s a topic she finds relatable and interesting when she’s older, or I could spread it into the wild and hope that over the next eight to ten years we see more games about women’s suffrage get designed and published. Because, if we’re serious, my daughter may find more excitement in a game about the extraordinary life of the Countess Markievicz than in her American contemporaries. Also, let’s be real, I could always just buy Votes for Women again later. There’s no harm in buying a game you once gave away, circumstances and tastes change.
But why am I even contemplating passing on my copy of Votes for Women? I clearly have such admiration for its design and subject matter, surely, I must love the game? The boring answer is that I don’t know why I don’t quite love this game, and that is incredibly frustrating to me. It could be the repetition involved in placing and taking away cubes, but I like man midweight Eurogames that are not much more than that. It could be that I’m more of an operational or tactical games person, but this is hardly the only strategic game I own and I’ve kept several that I think are probably technically worse designs. It certainly isn’t the production, which is top tier. I just can’t quite place my finger on it, which as someone who reviews games feels like a bit of a failure.
Okay, also in very minor complaints, I don’t like the checks and X marks. I just don’t enjoy manipulating them and I’m not wild about their aesthetics. I also don’t have an idea of what would have looked better, so it’s not much of a criticism really.
This malaise is not a unique experience for me, there are other times in my life when something I wanted to like so badly just didn’t click for me. Despite what some people may think based on my reviews of a few specific American Civil War games, I don’t actually like not liking things. I want to like things, especially things that other people I like also happen to like! It’s fun to be in the in-crowd, to be able to share your joy with other people and talk about what is so fun and exciting about something. This is especially true of something you were excited about before you ever played/read/watched it.
I was very excited for Votes for Women – I love Shores of Tripoli and the suffrage movement is such a great topic for a game. I love how it does not shy away from some of the more challenging elements of the chosen history. Its inclusion of the Southern Strategy and facing head on the racism that underpinned certain suffragettes’ views shows a more serious approach to history than many games currently out there. This is a game that takes history seriously, and that is something that I look for more than almost anything else when playing a historical game. But it doesn’t make me love Votes for Women. And I don’t know why.
That’s the end of it really – not a satisfying ending but the lack of a satisfying conclusion is kind of the point. I think you should play Votes for Women, but I also want to share that even if you ultimately decide that it’s not for you, that’s fine. I can support and cheer for a game that I ultimately am not very excited to play again because I can see its positive qualities, but I also think it would be slightly disingenuous to act like I do love this game. Maybe its addition to Rally the Troops will cause me to change my mind. Maybe I just need to play more games, or have the ability to play it on my phone. Time will tell.