Categories: Parenting

An Overview of the Board Game Clue

Did Miss Scarlet or Professor Plum commit the murder in the conservatory or the hall? Was the murder weapon a knife or a wrench?
Is Clue still one the best board games around?

Poor My Boddy- I wonder just how many times he has been murdered?
In our home the answer is well into upper hundreds.

We love this game. We still play this game. Do you?

Clue was developed in 1944 by Anthony Ernest Pratt. He marketed the game to Waddingtons Games with the initial name of Cluedo; it hit the market in 1949 due to supply shortages following the World War II. Parker Brothers bought the United States rights and renamed it Clue in 1949. A classic game was born!

Six possible suspects, six potential murder weapons, with the murder of Mr. Boddy in one of nine rooms; what is not to love about the complexities of this simple board game. Do you know the number of possible solutions? 324!

Yes, the premise is a murder, but this is a game of strategy, of deductive reasoning. Talk about educational!

One weekend my two children and I played this game for four hours straight each night. We laughed, we joked, we talked, and they THOUGHT. It was a great weekend.

How is this classic game played?

Set in a mansion, with the game board divided into nine different rooms. (Can you guess the rooms? Stumped? It has been that long since you have played this classic whodunit game?) The rooms are the library, the study, the conservatory, the kitchen, the hall, the billiard room, the dining room, the lounge and the ballroom.

The players (suspects) are guests of Mr. Boddy in the mansion. (Can you recall the list of suspects? Come on!!!) The suspects are Miss Scarlet, Mrs. Peacock, Ms. White, Col. Mustard, Prof. Plum, and Mr. Green. Game players play as suspects. My daughter prefers Miss Scarlet, my son loves Col. Mustard and me-I am partial to Mrs. Peacock.

At the onset of the game, three cards are placed in a yellow envelope. One card represents the murderer, another the murder weapon and the last represents the room where the murder occurred. No one is to look at these cards and they are placed in the middle of the board. The object is to use deductive reasoning to deduce (or guess) “who dun it”. The rest of the cards are then dealt out to the players.

Potential solutions can only be verbalized once a player has reached the inside of a room. Once there the player can state “I think it was Mr. Green in the kitchen (if, in fact, that is the room the player is currently inside. A player cannot chose a room he or she is not in as a potential murder site) with the candle stick (and the player takes the candlestick from the middle of the board and places it in the kitchen). In 2006 the rules were clarified to state that in order to make an accusation and not just a theory (the game rules call it a suggestion) the player must be in said room to make the accusation. (Well, we always played it that way anyhow). In the classic rules, a player can make an accusation from any room for any murder site. For clarification making a theory does not denote looking at the yellow envelope with the cards telling who did it. An accusation means a player can look at the cards if no one disproves his accusation. If the player is incorrect, the player is “out” for the rest of the game.