Votes for Women, one of the year’s best board games, belongs in a museum
Votes for Women is an elegant strategy board game that rewards an understanding of American history with exceptional gameplay. It carries forward the rich, card-driven mechanics of modern classics like Twilight Struggle and Labyrinth: The War on Terror,but in a much more digestible format. Vocal anticipation from the gaming community for Fort Circle Games’ second release has been completely validated. It’s clear that Votes for Women is a template for how historical strategy games should be presented to a modern audience hungry for new experiences at the table.
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A card-driven strategy game is a relatively new format in the world of tabletop gaming. The genre rose to prominence with Twilight Struggle, 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 and played cards representing historical figures and events. By essentially mixing up things like the Cuban Missile Crisis and the post-war Arab-Israeli conflict in a big top hat, Twilight Struggle gave players fine control over the most subtle levers of political power. That’s how the game came to occupy the top slot on the niche board game message board and aggregator Board Game Geek for so many years (until the coming of Gloomhaven,
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