As a second-grader, I despised recess. Not because I enjoyed class — it was boring and tedious, hemmed in by schedules and busywork — but rather because I was lonely. Some people don’t understand loneliness. They can’t. It wears the soul to a grainy powder. I had recently changed schools, bidding farewell to my friends and those familiar halls. Now I spent those interminable minutes wandering the lawns, balancing on the rocks, avoiding the bullies I half-knew from church.

And then, like the sun warming my face after a chill, there they were. Two friends. Adam and Adam. They invited me to play make-believe with them. We soared across the grass, scraped our knees together, became soldiers and explorers, scared ourselves silly at sleepovers, told our first dirty jokes. Once, afraid that I had done something that would make them abandon me, I burst into tears, only for both Adams to enfold me in a gangly, childlike hug, reassuring me that all was okay.

Everything was bright. For a time.

On the streets of London in search of a friend.

Molly House, designed by Jo Kelly and Cole Wehrle, tells the story of 18th-century Londoners who risk everything — reputation, dignity, fortunes, even their lives — in their pursuit of companionship. It is a game about the human yearning to discover people who would witness us at our most vulnerable, for life partners who would embrace both our potential and our frailties, our sex and our illnesses, who will become willing lovers and caretakers. The words have been repeated so often in our films and literature that it’s easy to forget their origins in the Book of Common Prayer and the Sarum Rite before it: “For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, cherish, and obey, till death do us part.”

For those who fit the mold, finding one’s place in the world is rarely easy. For these particular people in this particular place and time, that prospect is even more fraught. Where most of us face rejection or embarrassment, their rejections might well lead them to the gallows. These are mollies — sodomites and buggerers, to use the sweeping terminology of the time — and they do not fit into the slender conception of manhood that dominates the London of their day. They are not only despised but actively hunted, the Society for the Reformation of Manners seeking to entrap and arrest them for the moral good of the city.

To play Molly House is to keep one eye on your friends and another on the door. In its revelry, there is always danger. The suits of its deck become potential evidence. The appearance of a face card elicits a little thrill, suspended between terror and elation as everybody leans in to see whether the figure in the doorway is a molly, here to conduct the festivity for people such as yourself, or a constable, cane raised to crack your forehead. This is a game about joy. Hard-fought, stolen, desperate joy.

Come one, come all, come as you are.

When I wrote about an earlier build of Molly House a year and a half ago, I was struck by the determination of that joy, its resoluteness. This is the first big publication from Kelly, but Wehrle is no newcomer to designs that emphasize imperial violence, whether the adventuring armies of Pax Pamir, the empire-toppling merchants of John Company, or the opium-slinging traders of An Infamous Traffic. The violence in Molly House is of a different stripe. It’s a Sword of Damocles rather than a cavalry saber. But it’s there all the same, suffusing the experience with anxiety.

In the intervening months, the game has transformed. As before, most turns are simple, but the method underlying them has changed. Players roll two dice to determine how far they can move. This is more flexible than it might sound. Movement allowances hew closer to Talisman than Monopoly, your gentleman journeying either clockwise or counterclockwise. Moreover, you are free to use both dice together or only one of the pair. Often, this affords plenty of room to pick your destination.

But not always. In some instances, your pawn won’t be able to land where you would prefer. It’s a small thing, but it’s a reminder that limitation is a potent tool in any designer’s kit. As much as you might want to stop at a particular garden, or swing by that special store, or visit the molly house today, it’s a reminder that forces beyond your control conspire to prohibit your movements — both physically at the table and within the society playing out in its imagined space.

The result is a measured motion, always cautious, always inspecting where one is permitted to go. This prohibition extends to the spread of actions available to you. It’s always possible to lie low — to draw blindly from the deck, itself a risk. More often, there’s value in “indulging,” selecting a card from the game’s market that matches the suit of your current space. Or, if you’re willing to accept some risk, you might go looking for people like yourself. Just as 18th-century London contained arcades that were known as places that someone could solicit company, your pawn can cruise these destinations. There is potential here, letting you draw many cards at once. But danger, too, as the prospect of stumbling across a constable or rogue increases with each draw.

These festivities have a dash of danger to them.

The centerpiece of the design, and the reason for all those accumulated cards, is the festivity. These are only permitted when you visit a molly house, one of the destinations at the board’s corners. This is the main way you will score “joy,” the game’s label for victory points, but it’s also another opportunity for unwanted exposure and attention from the constables.

Where movement across London is restrictive, festivities are wellsprings. Everybody is invited, everybody may contribute. The objective, broadly speaking, is to build a hand of four cards, representing the acts performed by your protagonists in the safety of the molly house. As a game, Molly House is tasteful; these acts are never spelled out in detail. Instead, they are relegated to the four suits and brief descriptions. Perhaps you will hold a surprise ball, playing four sequential cards in one particular suit. Or maybe a molly will appear — a queen or jack — to permit a lesser festivity, such as gathering three additional similarly ranked cards or a run of three non-matches. When everything has been played, including at least two cards from the top of the deck that represent other attendees beyond your immediate circle of acquaintances, the best hand is tallied. Anyone who contributed a card to that hand earns joy.

These festivities are vigorous and exciting, offering a grand opportunity to churn your cards into points. But they are far more than that. Play your cards right and you can show up your fellow players. As I noted, only the best hand will score. This lends a certain cattiness to the proceedings, not unlike the sniping that occurs in any Austen novel. It’s entirely possible to host a festivity under the assumption that your modest hand will permit, say, a dance. But as your fellow sojourners stop by, perhaps increasing the card pool with a splash of gin or drawing outsiders into the party with the fiddle, a party might spin out of control. Now it’s a mock christening! Your cards aren’t scoring even though you’re the host! And look here — a constable!

This last possibility is the cracked capstone that keeps the festivity from true security. Constables pose a constant threat, as do rogues. The former collect evidence on the party’s attendees; the latter are members of your community who might present real trouble if not satiated. Fortunately, either can be placated if you host a quiet gathering rather than a grand bash. Of course, that isn’t entirely within your control. More than once, the table has conspired to throw the constables off our scent by hosting a dignified party, only for some ill-timed random cards from the street to strike up the band. Such moments are dizzying both in their comedy — Molly House is a profoundly funny game at times — and in the panic they trigger.

Betrayed. Found out.

The intrusion of the Society for the Reformation of Manners casts a pall over the celebrations. It isn’t uncommon for the game’s first round to be intoxicating, everybody collecting cards and throwing parties, heedless of how much attention their revelry attracts. This is the warm glow of a new relationship, that brief period when even one’s childhood seems overwritten by the exhilaration of something new.

But then the round concludes and the cards in the gossip pile are tallied. Constables and rogues that were dismissed from the market or lingered in player hands too long, plus any cards that didn’t score in festivities, are transformed into potential evidence against your revelers. Little by little, the houses on the board’s corners are imperiled. Eventually, one or more of them will be raided. And when this happens, Molly House turns a corner.

Around the bend, there is still the potential for joy. Until the last of the molly houses is shut down, the glimmer of hope that marks those early moments is never fully thrown into darkness. But the festival atmosphere does grow more muted. Depending on your reputation, the raiding of a molly house may result in an indictment. These pose an indignity that will be familiar to anyone who cursed the retirement rolls of John Company. When the game ends, acquittal is possible, although it will still diminish your joy. Conviction, on the other hand, will reduce your score even further — and may thread your character’s neck through a noose. In other words, your fate is once again cast out onto the streets to be determined by a mere roll of the dice.

However, your indictment is not yet put into effect. Instead, the constabulary offers you a deal. Either face the indictment or turn informant. This smudges the proceedings. The earlier festivities were always semi-cooperative. Your objective was to score the most joy by the end of the game, along with enough joy for the “house” to create a lasting community of like-minded fellows. Now, though, somebody may be working against that very community. Somebody in the parlor, at that very table, could be gathering evidence against the group. They have become the same rogues that needed to be treated carefully when they wandered into a party. And while you are free to accuse one of your fellows and reveal their face-down token, transforming them into pariahs if your guess happens to be correct, this is not an action undertaken lightly. This hidden community knows all too well the perils of a loose tongue.

Hiding all over again.

Historically, this is what destroyed the best known of the molly houses. Mother Clap’s was brought down by an informant. Three customers were hanged; Margaret Clap and a handful of her associates were pilloried and imprisoned.

In one light, this dampening of mood comes across as an unwelcome intrusion. Molly House is a celebration of queer joy, of the relief of finding companions with whom one is safe and accepted. Last year, I wrote about attending a game night for gay men, how I was welcomed into their home and shown such acceptance that it left me shaken. Not everybody understands what it means to escape loneliness, whether because they have never been truly lonesome or because they have yet to find acceptance. To play a game that extends its hand only to snatch it away, or at least to make one wonder at the offered hand’s intentions, is borderline cruel. Perhaps it doesn’t help that Molly House’s simple rules are also intruded upon, viciously complicated for those who turn traitor. In short: no more joy. Only the possibility of survival.

But this is also an essential part of the telling of queer identity. I don’t consider myself queer, but I have experienced the terrible loneliness that follows in the wake of companionship. I remember urinating with one of the Adams in the gully behind my house, when suddenly he spun and revealed his penis and forcefully insisted that I show him my own. I bolted, and locked the door to the house behind me, and wouldn’t come out until he promised to not do that again. Our friendship lingered a while longer, but it was never the same. Years later, when an older man from church had similarly revealed himself, and more besides, and I tried to express to my father how scared and confused the ordeal had made me, he thumped me on the chest and swore to have me committed if I ever talked like that again.

Even for a child like me, straight and bland and somewhat prudish, sexuality was something that could never be shared, only alluded to, elided, sidled around like a tiger seated in the living room. At times, carrying that loneliness was devastating. It is not good to be alone. When I met Summer as a buttoned-up returned missionary, I was drawn to her for a thousand reasons. But the foremost reason was that she seemed like somebody I could, at last, tell about my past without being tossed aside. I love her for her humor, her ambition, her body. But above all, for the trust she also shares with me.

Molly House is about all of these facets and more. It is about the fired coal of finding a friend, but also the flickering ember of being driven apart. In that way, it is as much about imperial power as the other titles in Wehrle’s historical oeuvre, about the way religions and states define boundaries, about how they divide communities and companions to make the task of enforcement that much easier, about how the casualties of these programs are not insignificant or unusual, but commonplace. Where John Company asked us to become bastards, and thereby understand the shambling horror of colonial power all that much better, Molly House asks us to become reluctant traitors of the self. And, hopefully, in the process, come out the other side a little more human.

The wheel turns. And turns. It never stops turning.

More than merely operating as a rumination on imperial power, however, Kelly has crafted a paean to queer resilience. This, I think, is Molly House’s last gift. That in its dark moments, it keeps the fire. In exposing how any would-be oppressor must divide before they can conquer, it becomes not only a fine example of historical expressionism, not even only a celebration of queer love, but a statement of solidarity. Bring in the lonesome, it says. Bring in the tired, the strange, the refugee, the outcast. There is room in this house. The gin is strong and the music is whirling. Together, we are more than we could ever be apart.

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A complimentary copy of Molly House was provided by the publisher.