You couldn’t get away with Clue today.

The heart of the game is actually very good. For the two people Out There who haven’t played, there are three types of cards: Weapons, Rooms, and People. One of each is set aside at random. The others are distributed among the players. The object is to deduce which three are missing. You do this by “suggesting” a weapon, room, and person, and the first person to your left who is able must show that you are wrong by showing you a card.

Anyway, in this heart, there are a lot of payoffs for a lot of people. It’s an exercise in deduction, and everyone gets to feel smart as they eliminate the impossible choices and gradually cross clues off their sheet. Kids can play, but for the observant and quick-thinking, there’s a lot of opportunity for skill. For example, if Alice suggests Mr. Green/Rope/Ballroom, and I’m holding Ballroom and Bob showed me Rope a while ago, but Chris is the one who proves Alice wrong, I can eliminate Mr. Green. Keeping track of who knows what and who’s making what suggestions for what reasons allows the game to be played on pretty interesting levels.

But there’s a fly in the ointment. Evidently, at the time it was produced, to have a board game, you had to have a board. The rooms are laid out on a board with little squares separating them. To get from one room to another, you have to roll a die and on your turn, you can move only that number of squares. You can only make suggestions that deal with the room you’re in. So if you need to ask about a room, it can take you a bunch of turns to get there; and if you keep rolling badly, you’re just out of luck.

To make matters even worse, when you make a suggestion involving a particular person, you grab their token from wherever it is and put it in the room with you. Evidently being idly suspected of murder makes you hurry. Tough luck if they were somewhere they wanted to be. Whether the asker is acting aggressively or just needs to use you as a convenient person to ask about, you might never get to get to the rooms you need to ask about, and there’s not a thing you can do about it.

And did I mention that all the die-rolling and moving of pawns slows down the game? It takes 45 minutes or an hour, which isn’t all that bad, but you could easily get two or three games in the same amount of time without the manipulation of pieces, wasting times in rooms you don’t want to be in, and cleanup afterwards.

In conclusion, Clue would be a pretty darn good, fast-playing, eight-dollar board game that you could play with players of all ages, if they would just lose the damn board. My gaming group doesn’t own the game, but my family does. Next time I meet up with my folks I’ll suggest this as a house rule and see how it goes.