Four LGBT Friendly Board Games to Play All Year ‘Round
Representation matters! Everyone should be able to see themselves in the games they play.
Happy Pride Month! 💗🧡💛💚💙💜
Board games are certainly not without their own issues regarding full representation. But, I like to think the hobby is getting better in that regard. And to help that along, here’s a short list of a few games with some decent LGBT representation.
Fog of Love
Fog of Love is a game we’ve looked at before. It’s a game about working together to make a relationship work. The players will encounter situations of varying degrees of importance and how they choose to work through each of those situations will determine how the rest of the game will move forward.
Dare to Love
Dare to Love has a heavy real-life backstory. The game’s story revolves around The Oligarchs subjugating and imprisoning people for daring to be LGBT. In real life, the game was released to bring attention to Taiwan’s fight for LGBT rights, where being imprisoned for being queer was a reality. The game came at a pivotal moment in Taiwan’s cultural shift and same-sex marriage was legalized there in May 2019.
Dance Card!
Dance Card! is a light strategy game where players try to make sure they get a dance with each of their dance partners before the night ends. There are 32 playable characters and the game was designed to be inclusive and representative of many cultures and orientations and letting each character have a style that best suits what makes them happy.
Pursuit of Happiness
Pursuit of Happiness is a game where players guide their character on a life-long journey. They get jobs, buy stuff, get hobbies, sure. But Pursuit of Happiness doesn’t ask the player to fall into any heteronormative definition of love. Players can have relationships whomever they want, or even with multiple partners at the same time in a polyamorous relationship. Pursuit of Happiness is a game all about its own title.
Honorable Mentions
Dead of Winter: The Long Night features an openly trans character whose gender identity is part of his narrative. Additionally, in more recent reprints of the game, a certain event card, Lover’s Quarrel, was rewritten from being a scenario involving two people of opposite genders to simple being two people. Nice easy change there.
Star Crossed is more of a role playing game than a board game, but it has players telling a story of two people in love who can never be together, for whatever reason fits the narrative they are building. Like the game Dread, it uses a Jenga tower as a story telling device. As the character’s passion and attraction grows, they remove blocks from the tower. Once the tower ultimately falls, the characters act on their feelings. and it’s up to the players to decide what that means.
Legacy of Dragonholt is a cooperative RPG style board game with no specific game master to run. It features several LGBT story lines which can be encountered.
Thanks for reading!
