‘Miss Scarlett in the Ballroom with the Rope?’
You know exactly what we are talking about, yeah? Cluedo. ‘The Classic Murder Mystery Game’ as some editions have written on the box as its tagline.
Dice rolling, character moving, card showing, old school deduction. A nice brain tingler of a game using pure logic to deduce and a bit of luck thrown in to boot. Do you know about its history though?
Well, a Birmingham chap (Wahey!), Anthony E. Pratt, came up with the idea during the air raids of WW2 whilst recalling the murder mystery games he would see being played in big posh houses whilst he was a musician before the war. (side note: there is a blue plaque in Kings Heath on the house he lived in when he invented the game!)
Patent applied for in 1944 under the name ‘Murder!’, then signed by Waddington and renamed Cluedo, a bit of a pun..(of course). Clue mixed with Ludo, not just referencing the game derived from Pachisi but also the Latin word for ‘I play’. This was shrunk to just Clue for the North American audiences as Ludo was released under other names there so they would not have got the play on words.
Post war shortages delayed the launch of the game until 1949 and changes were made to the game before release. Characters were dropped from 10 to the 6 we see in modern versions, rules were simplified (as any seasoned board game designer will tell you, always a good idea) and rooms and murder items were dropped.. no more ‘gun room’, ‘bomb’ or ‘syringe’!
Currently Hasbro owns the franchise and spin off versions from various properties have been made, also the film ‘Clue’ in the 80s, various video games, parody versions. Clue has become an institution, so much so that changes to the game can be known to kick up a bit of a fuss.
We still love a bit of Cluedo but sometimes you just want something just as light but a little bit different… so, what would we suggest?
The new deduction game contender: Wonder Woods!
Fungi! (resist the pun, resist the pun, resist the pun…)
It’s time to pick some tasty, tasty mushrooms. This has light elements of deduction and a nice dose of luck as well as mushroom meeples (mushles? meeprooms?) and plays beautifully from 2 to 5 players.
To win this you need to score the most points at the end of the game. Each mushroom you have at the end of the game is worth either 1, 3, 5 or 7 points. At the start of the game a card for each type (girolles, morels, boletes and parasol) is placed under each mushroom patch and the rest are divided up amongst the players. Now you see the Cluedo vibe! So if you have the 7 of morels in your hand, you know they are not worth 7 each… simple.
Turns could not be simpler, you have a number of baskets and when you fill the leftmost column on a patch with baskets you get a mushroom. The columns get longer, to me, this represents somebody else already picking the easy to get mushrooms. You go around the players until there are no baskets or not enough to get anymore mushrooms. Then whoever has the most baskets in a patch gets an extra mushroom.
Here’s the twist, at the end of the round you have the choice to reveal one of your cards to the table and if you do you get an extra basket going forward but everyone else now has more information.
Eventually a mushroom patch runs out and the game ends, the earlier hidden points of the mushrooms are revealed, scores tallied and the winner announced!
Sounds simple? That’s because it is. Where this game shines is the bluffing element… Once you play a game or two you’ll start reading into what the other players are doing… ‘Why are they going all in on parasols?… hmmm…’, so, occasionally getting a mushroom that you know is not worth a lot can signal to others that it might be… ooo… sneaky!
So, deduction, bluffing a little bit of luck too, Wonder Woods is an excellent light game that we heartily recommend and with those lovely wooden tokens there is not ‘mushroom’ left over in the box… *facepalm*
At least we didn’t resort to explaining why we are all jolly fellows… *ahem*