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Molly House

Created by Wehrlegig Games

From designers Jo Kelly and Cole Wehrle comes a game of queer joy and betrayal in 18th century London. Experience this immersive historical board game from the creators behind Pax Pamir and John Company.

Latest Updates from Our Project:

📨 Pledge manager surveys coming soon 🌆 PAX Unplugged Recap ⚒️ Updated Molly House Build
about 1 year ago – Fri, Dec 08, 2023 at 11:29:24 AM

Hi backers,

Here we are at the end of the year and what a year it has been! We're hard at work getting Molly House ready and we have some exciting developments to share with you.

Pledge manager surveys 📝

We have just started sending out emails to backers with pledge survey links! These BackerKit pledge manager surveys are critical to making sure your pledge is ready for fulfillment next year. These will be rolling out this weekend, and very likely across next week so do not be alarmed if you don't get your survey for a few days. If you have not received your BackerKit pledge survey by next Friday Dec 15, please reach out! Your pledge manager survey will allow you to review your items and submit your address for delivery. This is also a really important step for us because it allows us to best estimate how many copies we will print and send to different regional shipping hubs.

Importantly, we will not charge cards for any outstanding balances listed on your BackerKit pledge until July 2024 at the earliest! Right now the plan is to lock surveys around April/May and then charge shipping fees and lock delivery addresses when we are much closer to fulfillment Molly House (closer to late July for some backers and potentially as late as September for others). Survey lock, address lock, and card charging dates will come as a timeline update in March or so.

Wehrlegig @ PAX Unplugged 🎉

We just did our first convention as Wehrlegig and it was incredible. Check out these photos of the booth!!  We had Jo, Cole, and Aja running demos of our Molly House prototype all weekend and it was such a delightful time. 


We've done plenty of conventions but this was our first time putting Wehrlegig out there and showing off our games in full force. It was truly one of the best shows we've attended and to all the people that came by the booth to see our 18th century festivities and experienced the work-in-progress, thank you!

Development Update🛠️

After the campaign ended, we promised you that we'd take a moment to recoup and then get back into the game design weeds. Well, that is exactly what we've done. We took the most recent build and simplified many aspects while also increasing the strategic complexity of the game. We are really happy with this latest cut of the game (it wouldn't be a true Cole Wehrle collaboration if there weren't gameplay changes after the campaign).

We're going to be releasing this build as an update on Screentop.gg and tabletop simulator for everyone to explore in the coming days and we'll be doing more public playtesting soon on our Discord server. If you are interested in playtesting and joining the conversation around post-campaign development, join the Wehrlegig Games and Friends Server and see the Molly House dev threads. 

A final note 

Tom and the team over at SUSD put out a video (below) covering John Company and its many facets last week. I would feel some remiss if I did not share this video with our followers here and thank SUSD for the time and consideration of our work. It's a big, complicated game and we're honored to have a video that reflects the project. We appreciate our work getting highlighted by a great channel, and thrilled to have the encouragement for Molly House as we move things forward.


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Alright, that's it for now. Please let us know in the comments if you have any questions about anything. Molly House pledge surveys. Timeline questions. Access to the new MH build. Whatever it is, drop us a line. It helps to send specific questions about your pledge over email to [email protected]. Thanks for being here.

-Drew

✨ That's a wrap! Molly House Funded!
about 1 year ago – Fri, Nov 10, 2023 at 05:20:07 PM

You are all amazing!

With the help of 3,500+ backers we have raised over $280,000 for Molly House. This has been a thrilling project for us to explore publishing a true first edition and we thank you for coming out to support this game while it is still in development.

Without you, we would not be able to work on games like this. You've afforded us time and resources to bring the same the level of attention and care to this game that we brought to the second editions of both Pax Pamir and John Company. To all of the folks who backed and liked and commented and posted and shared this project, we see you and are so grateful to have you along.

The team will be taking a few days of rest before getting back to the work of making the game. Though we've come aways, this is really just the end of the beginning. During the campaign, we largely put the game's final design and development on hold. However, with the crowdfunding period completed, we're now able to return our attention to the work of making Molly House the best game it can be. Over the next few weeks, the core development team (Jo, Cole, and Drew) will be pushing hard on the design. Our goal is to make sure every element harmonizes well with the game's overall arguments and that the design continues to produce novel and compelling situations for players for game after game. We want this to be a game you could spent years playing. 

Then, in a month or two, we'll be sitting down with Rachel to hammer out the details of the game's artistic direction. Here the success of this campaign will allow us dramatically expand our initial plans for the game's art. Once we get our plan together, we'll likely start putting a new print-and-play kit together sometime this winter.  

What's next?

As we mentioned in our last update, this time of year is tremendously busy, and it won't be slowing down any time soon. Next week, we are both off to BGG con where we will be spending quite a bit of time working on Molly House. We won't be running public demos or anything, but if you're there, feel free to let us know in the comments and maybe we'll be able to pull you into a playtest! After that, it's off to Pax Unplugged where we will be running our first convention booth. We're happy to say that Jo will also be joining us in Philadelphia. If you're at the show, we'd love to meet you in person. 

The important thing for you to look out for in this next phase of the project is your pledge manager survey! Because we've only just received your pledge, we want to make sure that all our backers are equipped with information on how and when they'll receive their rewards. The BackerKit pledge manager allows us to send out surveys to organize your delivery address and make sure everything is confirmed well in advance of shipping. This allows us to calculate shipping accurately and customize your pledge exactly as you'd like. We're hoping to launch surveys in just a few weeks, so look out for the next update around PAXU with more details on the pledge manager and pictures from the show.

Okay, time to eat some pizza and celebrate how lucky we work on these amazing projects.

Drew & Cole

📖Molly House Book Club Live Stream and Upcoming Conventions
about 1 year ago – Tue, Nov 07, 2023 at 12:27:52 PM

Hello everyone!

I wanted to drop everyone a quick update. Firstly, we are streaming today! Cole is actually right now streaming a design update with Leder Games. Go here to chat with Nick and Cole for the next bit, and then tune in to Wehrlegig's Twitch channel in about 30 mins (3pm CST). We are going to be streaming our Book Club event with Dr. Kat today. Please come by and talk about these readings on Molly House with us. It's going to be a real nice time digging into some source material, and if you can't make it live, we will share the recording on our page tomorrow. 

Upcoming Things

Cole and I just returned from San Diego HistCon and we had such a lovely time with everyone we met. A weekend full of exciting conversations and great games. We ran a few demos of Molly House and it was wonderful to properly show it off at a show!



We are going to be going to BGG CON and PAX Unplugged this year too! Two great conventions sandwiching Thanksgiving and we've never done both in one year. We'll see how wildly exhausted we'll be by the end of it all, but we are excited to be bring Molly House in active development and running playtests basically the entire time at BGG Con.  We'll have a booth at PAXU, so if you are on the fence for PAXU, please come! Jo is flying out for their first time to the States and I hope this show is a warm welcome because we get to meet our backers that allow us to do this.

Also, we were hoping to have more information on our metal sculpts before the end of this campaign, but I am not sure if those samples are going to come through before the end of this campaign. Because of this I am going to extend an offer a very flexible policy on metal add-on refunds. We will provide full refunds and allow backers to add metal figures at the same backing rate through the entire pledge manager period. 

With only a few days left, the gratitude and appreciation for supporting this campaign is about to get overwhelming! We'll have an end-of-campaign update coming with timeline updates, info on the pledge manger phase, and what we'll be getting up to moving forward.

Thanks again and hope you'll check out the book club!
-Drew

Playtesting Kits are now live, Art live stream Saturday, October 28
over 1 year ago – Wed, Oct 25, 2023 at 09:56:12 AM

Hi again everyone,

Just a quick update to say that the playtesting materials are now live! You can check them out at the link and poke around the Molly House's development files. While the art and graphic design still have a while to go and the rules have some hiccups that need sorted out, we hope that exploring the digital and physical playtesting kits will still give you a good idea about how the game works and feels to play.

Also, there is now a link to Ricky's solo development video on Molly House on the campaign page. You'll see that the solo mode is still getting worked out so we do not have solo materials ready for playtesting quite yet, but hopefully in the coming weeks we'll have that ready. Ricky's wonderful peek into how the current solo build should give you a good glance into how it feels to play Molly House at 1P. If you want to get a feel for other player counts, our 2 player playthrough stream Jo and I ran yesterday is also in the Videos section.

And finally, I also wanted to plug a short interview we will be doing with Rachel Ford this Saturday, October 28th! We'll be talking about Rachel's process with the art of Molly House and learning a bit more about their other projects. We'll have a recording of our stream shortly after as well. Here's an exciting preview of some of the lettering that Rachel is working on for the cover too.


I hope to share a mock up of the box cover with the new drawn title in layout later this campaign, but that might have to wait until we return from our in person playtests of Molly House coming to San Diego HistCon next week! See everyone on the playtesting discord and on the art stream on Saturday! 

Thanks again and happy playtesting,
Drew

What's Next: Schedule Changes, Getting Back, Cole's in NYC
over 1 year ago – Mon, Oct 23, 2023 at 10:34:42 AM

Hi everyone,

Drew here. What a week! I just wanted to share another note of gratitude for the support and enthusiasm we've seen for Molly House. We rely on crowdfunding to bring our projects to life, and witnessing how excited folks are for Molly House has us feeling encouraged about this game and emboldened about future projects. We are thrilled we get to keep working on this project knowing that we have flexibility with production options to bring the best version of Molly House into existence. 

I have a few updates I wanted to share with y'all below:

Date Update

So the schedule listed today having a live playthrough and that was an error. Sorry! Jo and I are going to be streaming (and recording) a full game playthrough tomorrow, October 24, around 3pm EDT. The schedule has been updated with the new date and time for that stream, and we'll host it live over on our Twitch channel.

The other update is about the playtesting kits going live. Because I need a bit of extra time preparing the playtesting files and mods before they are shared widely, we are going to wait until Wednesday, October 25 to share the playtesting kits. I hope this isn't too much of a burden for folks, but trust me, it will be better to have a nicer experience playing Molly House for the first time! I'll be putting out another update later this week when those links are ready.

Getting back to things

Right after the first few days of launch, Cole and I took a long weekend with our families on Minnesota's north shore. This has been an exceptionally busy fall, and it was great to do some hiking and reflecting.  If I have not gotten to your comment or email yet, I will soon!



Lastly, I wanted to share a quick invitation to anyone in the NYC area. Cole is off to Bard Graduate Center this week and he is giving a talk on October 25 that is open to the public. Check it out here if you are interested in attending. 

Again, we'll be back on top of things in just a few more days, and as always, feel free to comment or send an email to [email protected] and we'll get to it as soon as we can. Thanks again for being the best backers out there!

Drew