Some games I used to play have a visceral appeal that still grabs me despite the game’s design flaws or general unsuitability now that I know about real, properly designed games. In this series I will dredge up the mass-produced games of my youth and try to figure out ways of changing them to make them better.

In comments to a previous entry I mentioned doing this for The Game Of Life, but I think this one is more bizarre so I’m starting with it. Our first case is the murder mystery game Clue (aka Cluedo outside of North America). This game is odd because all of the interesting pieces are more or less superfluous to the game.

Clue is at heart a card game. One card is removed from each of the the three decks and hidden. The three decks are merged, shuffled, and distributed between the players. The players then take turns making guesses as to which cards are hidden. By process of elimination, eventually one of them guesses right and wins. There are little psychological games you can play with your guesses to try and mislead people.

But as packaged, Clue is a board game. When you think of Clue, you think of all the other pieces besides the cards: the miniature weapons, the sprawling grid board representing the mansion, the secret passages, the cool little colored pawns. None of these pieces have anything to do with the game.

First problem: with the board in place, you’re required to take on the persona of one of the suspects to move around the house. You can win a game of Clue by deducing that you yourself are the culprit. This makes no sense; it indicates that you are not actually the person whose pawn is moving around the house, but rather a detective escorting them around the house. There’s no way in the game mechanics for the person who plays the murderer to know that they’re the murderer, and that they should work toward a different goal.

Second problem: the miniature weapons are totally superfluous. The only thing you do with them is teleport them into the room with you when you make a suggestion. What’s the point? The point is that they look cool.

Third problem: the rules tell you to set up all six tokens even if you have fewer than six players. This too is totally superfluous. The only thing you do with the unused tokens is teleport them into the room with you when you make a suggestion. Then they just hang out in that room until they’re teleported again.

Fourth problem: the board serves no purpose but to space out the players’ suggestions, since you can only make a suggestion for the room you’re in. This leads to the only honest-to-goodness strategy for Clue I’ve ever come up with, which is to issue a bogus suggestion just to teleport another player across the board, so they won’t be able to do their own suggestion in the room they want. I never would have thought of this when I played Clue as a kid, and as a strategy it borders on harassment. It’s not good enough to justify the inclusion of the board. The board is there because it looks cool, and because it adds an element of spatial planning to what would otherwise just be players taking turns making suggestions.

I get the feeling that development versions of Clue used the board and the weapon pieces more, but that it was too complicated or made the game drag on too long, so the teleporting rules were established.

In general, Clue has the feel of a stylish but poorly-designed boardgame version of the (much later) movie Clue, in which people did go around collecting evidence and did act like there was a murderer among them. Kill Doctor Lucky is not the greatest game in the world, but it’s much better than the game it spoofs because all its pieces and rules serve a real purpose.

A sensible version of Clue would be more like the movie. One player would be the killer, whose goal would be to obscure the truth and eliminate the other players from the game, either by causing them to make false accusations, or by killing them as well. (Or maybe the killer is one of the pawns that’s not playing this game, and all your paranoia is pointless.) Players would have reason to form alliances and stick together, and the board would have a real purpose. Still have to do something about the arbitrary accusation rules, though.

You could also ditch the rules of Clue and come up with new games to play with the pieces. Me, I’d like to see a tactical wargame fought in the Clue mansion, each player searching the rooms for weapons and duking it out in the hallways. Or a chase game, Tag or Hide-and-Seek or something. What would you like?