The ‘teleport accusations’ thing needs a complete work-over. What I find in my games of Clue(do) is that once everyone has found a room, they just start teleporting each other around, and it ends up being everyone taking turns making suggestions. Perhaps making it easier to move around? Spending three or more turns moving from one room to another does nothing for the game because there is nothing that can happen to you while you’re in transit (except be called to another room). Having one player as the killer could add a level of tension to the room-room movement, but how would the killer interact with other players without arousing suspicion?

I would like to see a hybrid Diplomacy/Clue(do), where in addition to moving from room to room making suggestions, there would be a turn each round where players could confer in secret, sharing evidence (evidence cards that you find in rooms! They could be good, but also gratuitous) and making alliances and so on. This also allows for the killer to interface with the other players in a way that nobody else noticed. There is probably a way to resolve the whole ‘two people going into a room and one person leaving’ thing without it looking totally obvious, but I can’t think of it right now.

Secretly, my awesome fantasy is Cluedo vs. Zombies!!! Solving murders while fighting the undead - awesome combination.

“You could also ditch the rules of Clue and come up with new games to play with the pieces.” - I did this many years ago, as a tabletop Nomic, using some version of Cluedo whose board was made out of interchangeable room tiles (but it didn’t do anything very interesting with the idea, from what I remember). It became a game of assassinating a (secretly-assigned) target pawn and then escaping through various defined exit doors, I think, with rules for picking up weapons to improve your attack roles, and being “safe” if you committed the murder outside of all other players’ lines of sight (unless you were using the pistol). Or managed to kill the witness before they could reach a phone, or reach another player to tell them.

But the idea of “safe” was a bit doublethink, from memory - normally if someone witnessed a murder they were allowed to use a telephone (which appeared in some grid squares as random board art) to call some police pawns in, who’d try to stop the murderer from leaving the house. But if you hadn’t witnessed the murder, you weren’t allowed to do make the call until someone had discovered the body. We might have explained this away as “hearing a suspicious noise”, I can’t remember.

Ben and I were talking about this a few weeks ago, for reasons I forget, and I don’t think we came up with any solid solution to the “secret murder” problem - it’d be great to have a game where NPCs (or even PCs) could be bumped off in secret, if they ended up alone with the murderer-player, and nobody but the murderer would be aware of it until the body was discovered. The best way to do this would be to just make it a networked computer game with completely secret movement - keeping it on a board, though, I think you’d have to include a GM player who’d watch over the game, know who the murderer was, assume that they’d kill at every opportunity, and announce that players are retroactively dead when someone found their body, or (a bit weirdly) when they walked back into an occupied room. (There might be some room for a Fury-of-Dracula/Scotland-Yard style “murderer is a known player, but has their own board behind a screen and moves secretly” system, but it’d be a shame to lose the paranoia angle.)

And oh, a Cluedo/Zombies hybrid already exists - it’s as dull as both games combined, but is notable for being an almost perfect ludemetic hybrid; it’s more or less a standard game of Cluedo, but with the rules of Zombies layered on top - because both games use a similar grid-based roll-and-move structure, it’s a very neat superimposition.

Amusing variant of the know-all GM thing might be an amnesia/Jekyll-and-Hyde affair where the murderer doesn’t know that they’re the murderer, and has to do something or other when the realise this, when they realise that all the dead bodies are turning up in rooms where they walked innocently past someone, ten minutes ago…

If there were zombies and dead bodies about, most people wouldn’t look terribly far for the culprit. On the other hand, what better time to get in some murdering of your own?

Now that you’ve brought up the undead, though, here’s a solution to the secret murder problem: anyone murdered becomes a zombie. As long as you can secretly communicate to a player that they’ve been killed, they can keep rolling the dice and staggering aimlessly around until someone else notices that they’re a zombie. Since this means dead players keep playing, there’d need to be some zombie goal to make them want to keep playing.

OK, here’s a stab at some mechanics. The cards go on the board, in the various rooms, not into players’ hands. Players go around the board looking for clues. Once in a room you can either draw a card (getting evidence directly) or make a suggestion (getting evidence from other players). One player can draw only one card from any given room.

Players move by rolling two dice instead of one. This gets rid of the dang movement problem. There is still little purpose to the board except as a way to make the acquiring of cards a matter of spatial planning instead of luck.

There is a “you are the killer” card. Once you draw this card, your goal changes to the killer’s goal. The only downside is that this makes all the “people” cards obsolete. You can’t determine the killer by the same means you can use to determine the weapon or location of the murder. There must be some other means.

New, hilariously bad idea: when the killer strikes again, another, recursive game of Clue begins, with a different set of cards. Who killed Colonel Mustard? Could it have been Ms. Peacock, in the billiard room, with the–urrk! Oh no! Who killed Professor Plum?

I have a vision of five people sitting around a Clue board after a week straight of playing, unshaven and red-eyed, with a list of murder victims spilling off the table. “Damn it, Plum! We’ll get to the bottom of this if it takes all year!”

I really like the idea of having cards in the rooms. It gives the rooms a purpose, and makes more sense from an ‘investigation’ point-of-view.

Could the role of the killer be assigned to a player without the use of a card picked up during play? I thought for a moment it could work if the players were detectives instead of suspects, but then having a player-killer makes no sense.

Perhaps if one player is assigned as a gamesmaster? Then they would be able to reveal to the killer that they were the killer at the beginning. But then you need another player, so it isn’t the best choice.

I tried to come up with a way of assigning the people cards in a way that one person would have the killer card and everyone else their respective person card (because finding out if you are the killer or not by asking someone else, or picking up a card never sat right with me), but I couldn’t work out how to do it without one person seeing the cards, and then the gamesmaster idea is a more efficient choice.

If you dealt one “person” card to each player at the start of the game, then let everyone pick their token… but then you’d have embarassing situations where the killer picks a token that turns out to be claimed by someone else. Maybe you just keep trying until it works out.

You could maybe have specific killer cards, eg. “col. mustard is the killer!”, but then how do you put the killer card in and remove the right ‘normal’ card?

Maybe, deal out the people cards, then deal out killer cards - only actually one card is the real killer card. That way, all the players get the same number of cards, and they all know who they are and whether or not they are the killer.

Well, there’s no need for the people cards at all; just deal out killer cards and let people pick the pawn they want.

Well, that certainly saves the “Dammit! I wanted to be x! Curse you and your random card assignment!” shouting matches which would certainly escalate under the other system.

It eliminates being able to find the ‘who’ the same way you find the ‘how’ and ‘where’, but finding the killer should be based on their suspicious actions during the game, in my opinion.

Aha, solving the wandering-corpse problem with zombies is absolutely perfect. The secret communication could perhaps be a weapon-card thing - give each player a weapon to begin with, and have the rules insist that players secretly flash their weapon cards to anyone they pass in an otherwise empty room. If someone flashes the poison card at you, then you have been zombified by the evil Dr Body.

I suppose it becomes a team game, from there. The zombies either have to attack the detectives (but hold back long enough for them to forget where the zombie came from), or just avoid them for as long as possible; if the detectives are all eliminated before they can unmask Doctor Body, then the zombie team wins. Perhaps with some sort of recognition for the zombie who put the most work in; the one that killed the most detectives, or hid for the longest number of turns before being discovered.

Not sure what the detectives’ victory condition would be - “unmask Dr Body”, ultimately, but it seems a bit weak that you’d have to split up and let some players get zombified, before you could do this. (That “let’s all just walk around the mansion in a large group, forever” would be a valid stalemate tactic.) Maybe they’d be happy to do that, though, if only one detective could claim the credit for unmasking.

And hm, you might have to allow Dr Body to pretend to be a zombie, pace Shaun of the Dead, to avoid a sudden and obvious ending when only two living players are left. Or maybe that’s a fair enough endgame.

Oh man, that is ten kinds of awesome.

Maybe the killer and the victim don’t even have to be alone? You could just give the killer a “zombifyingly evil glare” weapon card.

OR, decree that only two people may be present in a room at one time. It would work with the whole suggestion aspect of the game. Actually, that works quite well. Then, the killer can’t attack you unless you suggest/suspect him, which gives decent enough motive.

Of course, there would have to be a time delay between being attacked and becoming a zombie, otherwise it’s just too easy. Perhaps, the second time a player is suggested at (i.e. asked to reveal a card) after being attacked? I think that portrays the zombie-film-esque “this nasty wound? Oh, it’s nothing, it’ll clean right up” thing quite well.

Treatment! Somebody post a treatment!

Posted, hastily. Although it hasn’t appeared yet - I suppose they’re moderated?

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