Set in a fictional American community in The Roaring '20s, you select a girl from a dozen different girls to play your leader (or "queen" of your "gang"), and she recruits up to three girls to assist her. Each girl has varied abilities in four different talents (Popularity, Glamour, Rebellion, and Savvy), which determine how successful they will be when playing certain mini-games (Taunt, Expose, Fib, and Gambit). The goal of the game is to use the girls' different skills to gather information and expose the dirty secrets of the community without getting caught up in it themselves. Only the most charming, witty and rebellious are able to survive here.
This game contains examples of:
- Break Them by Talking: In the endgame, the townspeople begin slapping the gang with Strictures, four Hard Truth Aesops which sap their stats. These Strictures can be lifted by finding the four corresponding Morals, philosophies which refute the Strictures and can be asserted in the finale in order to give Mistress Fox and Maximilian a happy ending and defeat Mayor Stogie once and for all.
- Card-Carrying Villain: Jimmy Finn appears to be this. Except he has a very good reason for trying to destroy Brigiton, and it turns out he means no harm towards the girls despite their meddling.
- The Charmer: Your girls can acquire boyfriends by flirting with them.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: In-game. Susan Fragette fought for women's suffrage in Brigiton, and yet claims to the girls that trying to oppose Mayor Stogie outright would be going against the natural order - that women were meant to "guide" men, not "conquer" them. Part of this might simply be her having crossed the Despair Event Horizon, as her deal with Mayor Stogie - earning women the right to vote in exchange for granting him Droit du Seigneur - was supposed to get him out of office, but she overestimated the willingness of the townspeople to oppose such flagrant barbarism.
- Fate Worse than Death: In the original sense.
- Felony Misdemeanor: Learning the Gambit game has shades of this, as you're repeatedly told that it's supposed to be only for adults and dissuaded from learning it because it's "too dangerous." In practice, it's something akin to a two-fisted rock-paper-scissors game. Though to be fair, many of the game's story-critical challenges involve Gambits, with severe penalties if you lose.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: Played with. A successful Fib, for example, will result in your girl throwing out a plausible lie; however, when Mistress Fox tries and fails to convince Detective Friendly with a Gambit, her dialogue suggests she actually played the Gambit game against him.
- G-Rated Drug: Following Mayor Stogie's ill-advised attempt to ride one, pogo sticks are treated as the worst bits of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll rolled into one innocuous children's toy.
- Guile Hero: You play as a group of them.
- I Shall Taunt You: The Taunt minigame is Insult Swordfighting from Monkey Island with the serial numbers filed off.
- Mini Game Game: Your girls subvert authority by playing parlor games.
- Motifs: The game is designed to look like a board game, complete with cards and metallic-looking objects representing people. In addition, all of the mini-games use the four suits of a playing card deck (hearts, clubs, spades and diamonds).
- Mundane Fantastic: Brigiton has elements of this, with talking desks (that were once sentient trees), restless spirits, and one very bizarre case of reincarnation.
- Now, Where Was I Going Again?: The game provides helpful (and prominent) clues to suggest your next course of action, plus a handy recap function as a reminder of recent events.
- RPG Elements: Each girl has four stats, or "talents": Popularity, Rebellion, Glamour, and Savvy. Increasing these stats is vital to success in the various minigames: certain events provide temporary bonuses (or penalties), but winning enough minigames will allow a girl to boost one of their talents permanently.
- Shell Game: An early demo used this as a Fib minigame, where you try to trick an NPC by moving shells around. It was replaced by one more related to poker.
- So What Do We Do Now?: Invoked in the good ending, after all the loose ends are tied up. Then a UFO comes crashing down onto the soccer field...
- Taking the Bullet: In a figurative sense. If one of your girls has a boyfriend, and she suffers a penalty that would for some reason expel her from the group, the boy will sacrifice himself instead, allowing her to stay. Your girls will also do the same for their queen.
- Town with a Dark Secret: Brigiton is said to have given women the right to vote before anywhere else in the country. It's also implied that something horrible happens to women when they get married there. As it turns out, Susan Fragette earned women the right to vote in Brigiton through a deal with Mayor Stogie: he gets to rape the town's brides on their wedding night, and the husbands are made compliant through generous business deals.
- Unsettling Gender-Reveal: Not so much the gender that's unsettling, but the revelation that Bill the Talking Pony is actually the reincarnation of Mrs. Ross - and she's still in love with Mayor Stogie,
as she demonstrates in the endgame. - Whoopi Epiphany Speech: Played with. You can invoke the Morals in the endgame to convince Mistress Fox and Maximilian that they should defy Mayor Stogie and get back together, but you can subsequently point out that "a single moral isn't wisdom."
