Votes for Women Turns the Suffrage Movement into One of the Year’s Best Board Games

Votes for Women is the first game from designer Tory Brown and follows on the heels of several games in the last few years that try to take major historical events that aren’t wars to the tabletop. (Frankly, war has been gamed to death). It offers a host of documents in the box that explain the game’s historical context and provide more details. That’s fun and all, but what really matters to me is that this is a fantastic, fun, and very well-calibrated two-player game.

In Votes for Women, one of you plays Winifred Banks the Suffragist cause, trying to push the 19th Amendment through Congress and then get 36 states to ratify it, while the other plays the Opposition, trying to prevent either of those things from happening or running out the game’s clock of six rounds. Each player has a unique deck, campaigner meeples, and support tokens, and will play six cards per round to try to add support cubes to states or remove their opponent’s, or to lobby Congress to pass the 19th Amendment or remove some of that support. Every card has text on it that describes a specific action, sometimes depending on what else has been played so far, while players can discard any card to campaign—adding cubes to regions where their campaigners are—or to lobby Congress. Once Congress has passed the Amendment, it goes to the states; if the Suffragist locks in 36 states or the Opposition locks in 13, the game ends immediately. If the sixth round ends before that happens, players go to a final vote, rolling dice to determine which side gets each state. If, however, the Suffragist doesn’t get Congress to pass the Amendment by the end of round six, the Opposition wins.

If you’ve played the 2019 game Watergate, which I think has been the gold standard for games that try to depict major historical events, you’ll have a decent idea of how Votes for Women works. Both are asymmetrical games where each player has a unique deck. Cards have multiple uses, as described above. And the bulk of the game involves a fight for control of parts of the board—here for the 48 states that were in the union when the actual 19th Amendment was ratified and certified in 1920. Almost everything you’ll do here involves fighting with your opponent for control of the various states, removing their support cubes and/or adding your own.

The Suffragist wants to get six Congress tokens on the board at the same time to represent that legislative body passing the Amendment, and to secure control of 36 states once that’s happened, although the fight for control of the states runs for the entire game; if you have four support tokens on a state at the time that the sixth Congress token goes on the board, then that state becomes locked in for your side. The Suffragist starts the game with two Campaigners and support tokens in two colors, while the Opposition starts with one campaigner and support tokens in one color. Most cards have text that will either give you a way to add/remove a Congress token or to add/remove support tokens, or sometimes both. You may also Campaign, rolling a die for every campaigner you have on the board and placing that many cubes (one to four) in the same region of the map where your Campaigner is; or Lobby, rolling one six-sided die per Campaigner and placing a Congress token on the board for every six that you roll. There’s an added incentive to try to get four of your cubes on certain states early in the game, as there are nine state cards available every game, and once you get four cubes on the matching state, you claim that card and get to use it at any time as a free and usually powerful extra action.

There’s a lot of dice-rolling in Votes for Women, but the game allows for rerolls through buttons, which you can acquire by playing various cards that grant you additional buttons, or just by discarding any card for a single button. You may reroll all of your dice at any time for one button, but you have to reroll all of them, not just selected dice. (This is Votes for Women, not King of Seneca Falls.) If you want to move a Campaigner to any of the game’s six regions, you do so as an extra action by spending one button. And at the start of rounds two through six, you may bid any number of buttons to claim a single Strategy card from the table, playing it as a bonus action as you would a state card.

The game is exceptionally well-calibrated, so while the Suffragist has a much higher target of states to flip, they get to place a lot more cubes and have twice the number of Campaigners as the Opposition, with each player potentially doubling their Campaigner count through cards in their decks. You’ll get through all of your Early and Middle round cards, and then at least six of your Late cards, so there’s a lot of variance later in the game and there’s a fair chance you’ll get some cards in your hand that are useless or just attenuated because of how the game has progress (such as a card that lets you remove cubes from a state that might already be locked by one player at that point). It’s very hard for a player to run away with it, even with some fortunate dice rolls, because the cards are well-designed to make this a real back-and-forth where nobody can jump too far ahead. Once you understand what’s in the two decks, you can play a little more defense, but that’s a marginal gain; there’s nothing you can really do to defend against the Opposition cards that let that player remove up to ten cubes of one color from the map. It’s just going to happen.

It’s a text-heavy game, and that’s unavoidable here, although it does mean that you have to read English fluently to play, so it’s not a game for younger kids. What text there is, however, is extremely easy to read, with clear fonts on white backgrounds, and all game text large enough for me to read without my glasses (this is a thing now). The board itself is also brightly colored and uncluttered, so it’s generally easy to look at and quickly determine what you might want to do. The map has the two-letter postal abbreviation for every state, so if you’re not from the U.S. and don’t know the abbreviations, you might want to download Fort Circle Games’ free guide, and if you are from the U.S. and don’t know the abbreviations, how on earth are you sending mail? (It’s 2023, Keith. People don’t even send electronic mail anymore.—Ed.)

I’m blown away by how thoughtful and thorough this design is, and how well the game integrates the theme—which does not obviously lend itself to a board game adaptation—into its mechanics. Boardgamegeek actually classifies this as a ‘war game’, which rubs me a bit the wrong way … but it’s also instructive to think of it that way. You’re fighting an opponent for control of a map, and that control will go back and forth throughout the game. You’ll concede some territories without a fight to concentrate on some others. You aren’t moving units per se, and there’s no pew-pew-pew here with pieces fighting each other, but it has that same sort of intensity and the feeling that you’re just trying to crawl forward a few more inches to gain the one tiny patch of ground that will win you the battle. It makes for a tense game, in a great way, yet one that allows for fairly quick turns and game play that’s no more than an hour. Asymmetrical two-player games have become more common the last three or four years, but they don’t often hit the mark. Votes for Women earns its way to ratification.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.