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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.