My gaming group got together and played Insinuation the other night.

The good: It’s a lot of fun, more fun than I remember Clue being. The game doesn’t suffer at all from the loss of the board. The little notepads they ship with the Clue are really inadequate for the serious note-taking that will really help you out. Blank paper and pens worked quite well.

The bad: The fun of the game didn’t suffer from the lack of a theme. However, the fact that the three categories of cards were completely indistinguishable caused havoc, to the point of making the game nearly unplayable. Exchanges of the form “Did you say the two of spades, three of hearts, and two of diamonds?” / “No, I asked for the three of spades, two of diamonds, three of hearts” were rampant. One misunderstanding of a request caused grave confusion (when a player realized several turns later that he did, in fact, have one of the cards he had been asked for) and I have a suspicion that another mishearing (or was it misspeaking?) cost another player the game on a wrong guess.

Clue, of course, doesn’t suffer from this problem at all. It’s impossible to mistake “Rope and Ballroom” for “Wrench and Library.”

The solution: Well, we obviously needed a theme. Late-night banter brought us to apocalyptic conspiracies, and the categories are now:

· Secret Societies (the NSA, the Illuminati, the Templars)

· Ancient Evils they’re trying to summon (Lucifer, Cthulu, Dracula)

· Locations (Atlantis, the Pyramids, Stonehenge)

“Fuleng,” as he’s calling himself in the comments, used Illustrator and the finest images Google Image Search could provide to print up some cards (so no, unfortunately, I can’t share them.) They’re hilarious and we’re going to try it again as soon as possible.

The only downsides are that you can’t just use an ordinary deck of playing cards, and that preprinted note sheets are again required. (Although everyone can remember the numbers 2-7, it’s necessary to have a cheat sheet so you’ll know which secret society you haven’t eliminated.) These, of course, are created with no problem.

The only other refinement I’m planning is to adjust the number of cards in the “long suit” before the game starts so that every player has the same number of cards to start.

We’re also considering a rule that if a player loses, his cards are dealt out to the other players (so he doesn’t have to sit around for the rest of the game). This strikes me as dubiously balanced, so we’ll see if it’s still necessary in the newly-themed variant.

Its name is Crackpot Theory, by the way.