The Vote: Suffrage and Suppression in America

About this board game

The Vote: Suffrage and Suppression in America is a two-player game of approximately 120 minutes about voting rights in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

One player takes the role of Equality, advocating for two constitutional amendments: the Seventeenth Amendment, which transforms the Senate into an elected body, and the Nineteenth Amendment, which secures women’s right to vote. The opposing player, Supremacy, resists these goals while seeking to entrench racist methods of voter suppression, intimidation, and discrimination.

The game places special emphasis on the tension between federal and state politics. Equality works toward local legislative victories that make passage of the amendments inevitable, while Supremacy can oppose those gains and even reverse them through carefully timed intervention by the Supreme Court.

• Face-up events display: Cards are dealt into a shared events display, and their function depends on their type rather than being limited to a single event.
• Reserve and organization: Used cards can enter a reserve, creating a lasting hand for actions and reactions. Organizational capacity grows through play of an organization card.
• Passive abilities and regions: Face-up reserve cards can trigger passive abilities at the end of a turn, while region cards provide free bonus actions.

As in the designer’s This Guilty Land, cards can move from the display into a reserve and remain important throughout the game. However, The Vote presents a different historical tension: the political system is functioning as intended, and both sides can pursue their aims within it.

Equality may achieve constitutional victories, but those victories remain incomplete. The result is a game shaped by both triumphs and failures, reflecting how struggles over voting rights continued long after the game ends.