Votes for Women

In Votes for Women, you are invited to join the movement for women's suffrage, starting in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention and navigating the ups and downs of the next seventy years. Will you succeed in this card-driven game by winning support in three-fourths of the states needed for ratification? Or will the opposition stymie progress and prevent enough states from ratifying the Nineteenth Amendment, dashing our hopes for equality? Play this 60 minute game to determine who will out-campaign and out-organize their competition to win. 

Votes for Women, designed by Tory Brown, can be played competitively, cooperatively, or in solitaire mode. Players may play cards for their events, to campaign, to organize or to call for a vote in state legislatures to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. Game play occurs over three eras that correspond to important historical periods of the movement up to the exciting culmination of ratification in 1919 and 1920. The Support player needs 36 states to pass ratification to win while the Opposition player needs only 13 states to bury the 19th amendment.

The gorgeous cards feature some of the famous leaders we already know, plus many suffragists who have been left out of the narrative but whose contributions were critical to the passage of the 19th amendment, as well as the events, publications and clubs that were instrumental to winning not just suffrage but to advancing the women’s rights movement overall. The opposition cards highlight the events, forces, industries and individuals, many of them women, who nearly thwarted the greatest expansion of citizenship in American history.

 Votes for Women comes with the following:

• A beautiful mounted game board featuring a map of the continental United States
• Over 100 high quality cards that feature portraits, historical documents and stunning artwork from the period
• 18 organizing buttons
• An illustrated, easy-to-understand rule book
• An original historical essay and numerous historical documents and postcards from the struggle
• Over 300 wooden pieces and sixteen dice