Molly House

Two scores. One twist.

Two things are being counted, and they pull in different directions.

There's a shared community joy track — the community has to last the five weeks by pushing that marker past a threshold (30 in a four-player game). And separately, each of us hoards our own personal joy. If the community survives, the player with the most personal joy wins. So we cooperate to keep the house alive, and compete to be the one who lived most fully inside it.

Roll · Move · Act

Your whole turn is three beats. Roll the two movement dice, move your pawn by the number of boots they show (resolving any market-discard icons first), then take exactly one action. The basic actions are available anywhere; your site may offer a fourth.

The actions: Lie Low (draw the top card), Indulge (take a market card matching your site), Accuse (flip a rival's token) — and the site actions Cruise, Shop, and the big one, Throw a Festivity. The festivity is the engine of the whole game, so we'll start there.

How to read a card

Here's the device we'll use the whole way through. The deck you draw from is the Vice deck — 52 cards across four suits — and every card is a single shorthand declaration: suit, value, and the joy it's worth.

.card {
  vice: hearts 7 / 4★;
}

vice-suit:  hearts;   /* one of the four houses */
vice-value: 7;        /* magnitude — high = riskier */
vice-joy:   4★;       /* joy scored when fulfilled */
vice-kind:  desire;   /* a numbered Desire card */

The four suits each map to a molly house in a corner of the board. Think of them as the values this shorthand can take:

Three kinds of card share the grammar. Desires are the numbers (1–9). Mollies are the face cards — Jacks and Queens, each a real historical molly. Threats come in two flavours: constables (officials, value 0) and rogues (named informers, a wildcard you set from 0 to 9). Same shorthand, different vice-kind:

/* a molly — scores you nothing alone, but pays a bonus later */
.queen     { vice: hearts queen / +3; }   /* +3 per matching desire */
.jack      { vice: pentacles jack / +2; } /* +2; +5 if you hold both */

/* threats — wonderful in a set, ruinous in your reputation */
.constable { vice: cups constable / 0; }     /* always value 0 */
.rogue     { vice: fans rogue / 0–9; }     /* wildcard — you choose */

The Festivity

This is what you're really here to do. A festivity is a gathering where everyone plays cards to build the best possible set — like a hand of poker.

Whoever starts it takes the candelabra and becomes the Runner, the host. Cards are played over two rounds (three with two players). At the start of each round a card is flipped from the deck into the centre — that's the community's card. Then everyone plays one card or passes — except the Runner, who can never pass. After the rounds, the best four-card set is pulled from everything on the table.

The four sets, best to worst

They are poker hands. The ranking is the mnemonic — remember the ladder:

An item can bend these rules — see the Dress

Build one yourself

Here's a table mid-party — one card is the community's. Hit Resolve the set to pull the best four, then step through fresh tables to see each kind of night.

So a great festivity does two things at once: it grows your reputation and keeps the community alive. Reputation is good. Hold that thought for thirty seconds.

The catch: reputation is evidence

The very thing that scored you all that joy is exactly what gets you caught.

When a threat is publicly sent to the gossip pile, the most infamous molly in its suit is exposed — the player with the highest total value of matching reputation (mollies count as 10). That player dumps every matching reputation card into gossip and takes a reputation cube for each.

At the end of each week the Society investigates: shuffle the gossip pile, set a third aside to the Safe pile, and reveal the rest. Each revealed threat generates one evidence per matching card revealed beside it — so two cups cards next to one cups constable is two evidence on the cups house. Evidence is placed as cubes on the houses. When a house reaches seven, it is raided: it can no longer host, and the players with the most and second-most reputation there take a major and a minor indictment.

Watch a house fill up

We're investigating Julius Cesar Taylor's (cups). Reveal each week's gossip and watch evidence accrue — threats × matching cards — until the door comes down at seven.

This is the Society Investigates step — see the full End-of-Week sequence

Trust is a resource

Back to that twist. Each of us has four face-down encounter tokens — three loyal, and one informer.

.you {
  encounter-tokens: loyal loyal loyal informer;  /* 3 + 1, face-down */
}

Whenever a raid indicts you, you place one of these tokens face-down on the nearest open house. If you've placed your informer token at a house and that house is raided by game's end, you win a different way — you wanted the fire.

Your defence is Accuse: if a rival's pawn is on your site, flip one of their placed tokens. Guess wrong and it's loyal — you lose 3 joy for the slander. Guess right and it's the informer — you score 3 joy, push community joy +3, and out them. Exposing a traitor protects everyone. So spend trust carefully.

How an informer actually wins — the end-game scoring

Now we just start

The game runs up to five weeks. At each week's end there's an investigate-and-cleanup sequence, and there are item cards (gin, a domino, a dress, a violin…) — but we don't pre-load any of it. We read it aloud the first time it happens, and we let the first raid sting when it comes. That sting is the teach finishing itself.

The full End-of-Week sequence And how the end-game scores And a worked item example