Quills! is a cooperative game experience that celebrates Herstory with fiction and poetry from the Regency Era into the 1920s that planted seeds for the feminist revolution. Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Frances Hodgson Burnett are classic writers featured in the gameplay, while Emily Brontë, Anne Brontë, Virginia Woolf, and others appear with their inspirations. In the Quills! Classic Edition, each key writer comes with Authoress, Heroine, Book Passage, and Memoir Butterfly Story Cards to rescue from Hannah’s windblown desk as she races the clock to meet her manuscript deadline.
Also available:
Regency Edition I
Players gather Heroine, Friends, Insights, and Dance cards for Jane Austen and each of her six novels, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. Coming soon: Quills! Regency Edition II. >>
Quills! Regency Edition II
Players explore the darting of Cupid’s Arrow and Courtship of 12 Heroes & Heroines from Jane Austen’s six novels.
Haworth Edition
Explores the gothic novels of the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne–plus Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte’s biographer.
Victorian Era Edition
Celebrates the heroines from the works of Elizabeth Gaskell.
Concord Edition I & II
Captures the dreams of Louisa May Alcott’s archetypal characters in Little Women; celebrates the heroes and heroines of Concord.
Elizabethan Edition I & II
Highlights the heroines and heroes & heroines of William Shakespeare’s plays, written during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.
Fairy Tale Edition
Explores the heroes and heroines, their friends and helpers, and highlights from selected fairy stories gathered by the Brothers Grimm during the Victorian Era.
Each bespoke game is made to order, uniquely crafted by hand and signed as a playable work of art.
Montage:
Queen Elizabeth I of England and Ireland, circa 1592, Anonymous; Jane Austen, 1873, Unknown; Queen Victoria of England, 1845, Alexander Melville; The Brönte Sisters, circa 1834, Patrick Branwell Brönte; Jane Austen, Cassandra Austen; from Wikimedia Commons. All other photos by Janine Fron.
"Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.”
-Marianne Dashwood
Sense and Sensibility
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In Quills! Regency Edition II, a double-feature cooperative game set, players explore the darting of Cupid’s Arrow and Courtship of 12 remarkable Heroes & Heroines from Jane Austen’s six cherished novels:
Set I:
Elinor & Edward Ferrars
Elizabeth & Fitzwilliam Darcy
Jane & Charles Bingley
Fanny & Edmund Bertram
Emma & George Knightly
Catherine & Henry Tilney
Anne & Captain Wentworth
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Set II:
Marianne & Colonel Brandon
Mr. & Mrs. Bennett
Jane & Frank Churchill
Harriet & Robert Martin
Sophy & Admiral Croft
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"My affections and wishes are unchanged; but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever.”
-Fitzwilliam Darcy
Pride and Prejudice
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>>Available @ Marigold Games
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In the Quills! game series, players are creatively empowered to bring classic literary works to life and make them their own. A mix of players who are fans with their favourites and newbies experiencing these works for the first time can make each game fresh and is at the heart of the game’s ‘magic circle’. No two game experiences are ever alike. Each edition of Quills! provides dramatic cues for players to create dynamic social interactions with lively conversational insights to share together.
“Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
–Virginia Woolf
’Shakespeare’s Sister’
A Room of One's Own
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Virginia Woolf appears in special messages in the Quills! Cooperative Literary Game Series. Woolf is admired for her innovative novels, including Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando, which were both adapted to award winning feature films. She is also well known for her classic essay 'A Room of One’s Own' penned in 1929. Woolf’s sentiments continue to resonate with new meaning today as women and girls redefine spaces of their own to work and be creative in during these transformative times.
Woolf was a fan of Jane Austen, the Brontë Sisters, George Elliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell, who are part of the Quills! Classic Edition game set. She appreciated and acknowledged, “Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
Like Jane Austen and the Brontë Sisters, Virginia Woolf was close to her sister, Vanessa Bell, who was a trailblazing English painter and Founding Member of the Bloomsbury Group. When they were young children, the sisters enjoyed playing Cricket and other games together.
Their father, Leslie Stephen, who was an author and literary critic coined the term “Austenolatry” for Jane Austen’s rising fandom akin to “Bardolatry” after Shakespeare. The pioneering Victorian Era photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron was their great-aunt, whose favorite portrait sitter was their ethereal mother, Julia Jackson. Cameron’s dramatic portraits of poetic, fictional and biblical characters captured an imaginary world of storytelling and dress-up play with a feminine mystique.
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“I do not think it matters whether one agrees or not as long as ons is forced to think.”
―Vanessa Bell
Selected Letters Of Vanessa Bell
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It is interesting to note that Woolf’s title character, Orlando, is also a character in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Similarly, Woolf’s Orlando explored gender roles, like the bard’s play, however; she went even further by creating a unique, time traveling biography that imaginatively expresses ideas about reincarnation and one’s soul journey across multiple lifetimes, as alternately being both a man and a woman, who share the same soul.
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Portrait of Virginia Woolf, British author and feminist, with her chignon, 1902, George Charles Beresford, from Wikimedia Commons.
Whether playing with 2, 3, or 4 players, the Quills! gameplay encourages aspects of roleplaying in dramatically reading the Butterfly Story Cards and Special Messages aloud together; and also a playful mood of Cosplay, with the unique materials in which the game was made that can be used as theatrical props.
No two people ever read a book, imagine or interpret it quite in the same way, which is a very exciting element that carries into the Quills! gameplay. Anecdotes from the Butterfly Story Cards often channel lively conversations between players that enhances the mood of the game and the memories players take with them beyond their unique experiences.
Photo Montage:
With special thanks to Natasha Lehrer Lewis.
“You know full well as I do the value of sisters' affections: There is nothing like it in this world.”
–Charlotte Brontë
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In the Quills! Haworth Edition, players explore the intersecting histories of the Brontë Sisters–through their individual heroines’ challenges and insights.
The Quills! Victorian Edition further contrasts the insights of Elizabeth Gaskell’s heroines, whose biography of Charlotte Brontë inspired Louisa May Alcott.
In the gameplay of Quills! Concord Edition I, players engage with the insights and explore the dreams of the March women: Meg, Jo, Amy, Beth, Marmee, Aunt March, and their creator, Louisa May Alcott.
Each of the March women in the Quills! game has a different temperament and life path that is unique to each character–which resonates differently with each reader’s imagination. We all have personal, favorite heroines who inspire us and dreams of our own. This is the heart and soul of the social experience the Quills! Game Series provides for players and fans.
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“I want my daughters to be beautiful, accomplished, and good. To be admired, loved, and respected. To have a happy youth, to be well and wisely married, and to lead useful, pleasant lives, with as little care and sorrow to try them as God sees fit to send.”
>>Available @ Marigold Games
With special thanks to Natasha Lehrer Lewis.
The intersecting herstories of Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontë Sisters, and Louisa May Alcott–who lived during Queen Victoria’s reign–are all key inspirations for the Quills! Herstory Bespoke Game Series.
In 2018, Little Women celebrated its sesquicentennial anniversary, and was retold in films directed by Greta Gerwig and Clare Niederpruem; and a PBS mini-series directed by Vanessa Caswill. Also 2018 was the bicentennial birthday of Emily Brontë, the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the bicentennial of Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Northanger Abbey.
Louisa May Alcott was an acquaintance of Elizabeth Gaskell, and felt a kinship with the Brontë sisters, whose works are explored in the Quills! Haworth Edition game set.
The Quills! Classic Edition is the first game created in the series, inspired by the writings of Jane Austen. The Quills! Cooperative Game Series was presented during a breakout session at the JASNA AGM 2017 in Huntington Beach, and featured in the Author’s Book Signing. The Quills! Series was also mentioned in the Jane Austen Special Issue, Texas Studies in Literature and Language (2019).
Perhaps these pages may never meet a human eye and therefore no excessive vanity can dictate tho perhaps a feeling akin to it, self-love, may have prompted my not unwilling pen.
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
2-4 Players, Suggested Ages 14+
The Quills! Classic Edition is the first game created in the series, inspired by the writings of Jane Austen. The Quills! Classic Edition Game Set includes:
1 Set of Instructions
1 Butterfly Authoress Card
28 Butterfly Story Cards – 1 Authoress, Heroine, Book Passage
& Memoir Card for each Literary Figure
70 Game Message Cards
40 Feather Quill Pens
7 Petite Ribbon Roses
1 Lace Trimmed ‘Desk Blotter’ Cotton Play Mat
1 Butterfly Muslin Drawstring Storage Sack
>>Available @ Marigold Games
O that I knew he were but in by the week!
How I would make him fawn and beg and seek
And wait the season and observe the times
And spend his prodigal wits in bootless rhymes
And shape his service wholly to my hests
And make him proud to make me proud that jests!
So perttaunt-like would I o’ersway his state
That he should be my fool and I his fate.
Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost: Act Vi, Scene IiI
>Featured in Quills! Elizabethan Edition II: Heroes & Heroines of William Shakespeare
Imagine a time when people collected butterflies and wrote with feather quill pens by candlelight. In the Quills! Fairy Tale Edition, players gather Hannah’s windblown notes from the Brothers Grimm stories to help complete a manuscript in their honor.
For 2-4 players, suggested ages 8+
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“The two children were so fond of one another that they always held each other by the hand when they went out together, and when Snow-white said: ‘We will not leave each other,’ Rose-red answered: ‘Never so long as we live,’ and their mother would add: ‘What one has she must share with the other.’”
161. Snow White and Rose Red
The Brothers Grimm in Quills! Fairy Tale Edition
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Players share stories of the heroes and heroines and their friends and helpers from the Brothers Grimm fairy stories featured in Quills! Fairy Tale Edition, while enjoying macaroons on location at a local treasure–All Chocolate Kitchen in Geneva, Illinois.