Sorry about the delay, Kevan; thanks for letting me know it was there.

I’m wondering if we haven’t strayed a bit from out original tack here. This does sound fun, but it’s still a cards-and-dice game. Weren’t we going to try and come up with a system that used all the cool props? Other than the two-people-in-a-room-alone thing, how is the board being used? Why would you ever have a reason to go into a room with someone else, knowing that he or she might well be Dr. Body?

(Hm, sorry about the formatting; was expecting line breaks to be picked up as paragraphs. Presumably there’s no way for me to edit it from here?)

And mm, I was aware I was probably straying a bit, that maybe we should insist that treatments are written up by people who have’t been thinking about the game too much. And not by people who’d forgotten that there were weapon props as well as cards.

The weapon props could perhaps serve the same reroll function as the weapon cards described above, except that they start on the floor in particular rooms, to be picked up during the game (and carried openly, whereas your weapon card remains a secret) - this gives the board a bit more meaning, and presumably some incentive to split up and grab the extra weapons.

Might be interesting to give the weapons slightly different abilities, as well, to add some depth to the game. Revolver allowing ranged attacks within line-of-sight, Rope only being discarded when you hit with it, or something.

I don’t have a solution for this, just trying to create a frame for looking at the problem:

Clue has public and private information. Which cards are which is private information, and everything else is public.

The basic problem with the original game is that every piece of private information has a corresponding piece of public information: the rooms, the pawns, and the weapons. The game as it is gives pride of place to the private information, but in doing so makes the public versions of that same information totally redundant. Lame additional rules are neccessary to justify the inclusion of the public information.

It seems we’ve gone in the other direction: using the public information for more and more, at the expense of reducing the private information to single bits of information. I think Zombie Clue would be better without the cards, just as regular Clue would be better without everything but. That’s why I don’t have a great feeling about our consensus Clue remake: its use of the cards like the same sort of hackiness as regular Clue’s use of the other parts.

Can we avoid the redundancy by using the cards as handles for the physical objects? If we are going for an “avoid the zombie threat” theme, could you use the cards to teleport your pawn to to Room X / Weapon Y / Character Z? Rooms would be static locations, weapons could be picked up and carried around and dropped when you found something more suitable, and players move of their own accord.

Wow, that’s great. Use the cards as single-use special ability cards instead of information cards. It kind of breaks the spirit of the game for people to be teleporting around the board, but it’s not like the original game doesn’t have that problem.

Aha, very good. Giving each player a hand of cards makes the game a bit more strategic for Dr Body, as well; if the rule for passing someone in a room becomes “flash a card of your choice from your hand”, then - if he’s got another card - the Doctor can choose whether or not to keep a low profile. (And, more importantly, paranoia is maintained, that everyone could still be a suspect.)

Would be nice if we could work out a way for card-flashing to emerge from the shape of the game, rather than being a clumsily forced “you must do this if you’re alone in a room with someone”. In The Things, players were encouraged to trade cards in “conversation”, and could be tricked by someone who was offering their ideal trade - perhaps Zombie Cluedo needs an element of players working together to build powerful hands of cards, but not in the presence of Doctor Body. To echo the original Call of Cluedo, the detectives perhaps have to build a specific three-card hand of location, weapon and character to win, but can’t just sit around in the kitchen swapping cards openly, because (if we say that the Poison can also be used as a last-ditch auto-kill weapon, or something) the Doctor will sit and watch and poison whoever gets the winning hand. So there’s some incentive to sneak around and have private conversations with players who you trust not to kill you.

Teleporting around the mansion seems acceptable in terms of secret passages. Having weapon and character cards work in exactly the same way as location cards sounds a bit unexciting, but the symmetry is nice.

How would the cards be dealt? Would there be a draw pile, and if so, when would you draw from it? (Skip a turn to search your current location? Perhaps require that you show your drawn cards to everyone, if you were in an occupied room, but keep them a secret if you were alone, to encourage sneaking off.)