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The great Clue fiasco
Have you ever been in a situation where something goes horribly wrong, and it’s obvious to all concerned that it’s entirely your fault? I recently found myself in that situation—over a casual game of Clue.
Clue, for those who are not familiar with it, is a board game that’s been around since1949. The board is laid out to show nine rooms of a country house: the Conservatory, the Ballroom, the Library and so on. There are six characters, such as Professor Plum and Miss Scarlet, one of whom has committed a murder. The murder weapon is one of six implements, such as the Rope, the Candlestick and the Lead Pipe. The murder victim is the mansion owner, the unfortunately named Mr. Boddy, who plays no part in the game, which is just as well because after all he is dead.
The object of the game is to deduce which one of those six characters committed the murder, with which implement and in which room. Each character, weapon and room has a representative card. At the outset of a game, one card from each category is selected from a face down pile and put away in a Confidential Case File envelope. The remaining cards are dealt among the players.
Each player then mines the others for clues to the solution by suggesting to the person to his or her left that the murderer may be, say, Mr. Green, with the Revolver in the Study. If the suggestee has one of the cards, he or she shows it to the suggester, privately. If he or she has none, then the same question is posed to the next person in line.
As the questioning proceeds, you slowly gain insight into what cards are held, or not held, and by whom. Get enough answers to your suggestions and you can deduce what’s in the Confidential Case File. You can then use your turn to formally accuse a person, specify a weapon and name a room. You consult the Confidential Case File, without revealing its contents to the other players. If you are right, you win the game. If you are wrong, you keep the details to yourself, put the cards back in the Confidential Case File and forfeit your chance to win.
Some of the information you obtain by this questionning is black and white: if an opponent has shown you a card, you can cross that one off your suspect list. But there are also grey areas. You don’t know if your opponent holds either of the two other cards about which you asked, because he or she only has to show you one card, and will show you the same card again if asked about it. And another player watching the transaction can only guess which of the three cards the suggester has been shown.
All of which is to say that the game is usually fun, although it can quickly get quite complex. So when a friend dropped by recently and said he had just heard about the game and wondered what it was all about, I jumped at the chance to show it to him, dragging my wife in as well.
I carefully explained the rules to him, no doubt in a somewhat patronizing tone. I dealt the cards into three piles, one for each of the murderer, the weapon and the room. I then took each pile and shuffled it, face down, selected one card at random from each pile, and put those three cards in the Confidential Case File. I dealt the remaining cards among the three of us, and the game began.
After a while, a problem developed. I had eliminated all six weapons as the murder weapon—but that was not possible because it had to be one of them. Thinking my note taking must have been faulty, I went over familiar ground but came up with the same result. My game mates began to get restless and commented that we seemed to be going round in circles.
Eventually, with an ‘I can’t take this any more’ expression on hs face, my friend summoned the courage to make a formal accusation. He opened the Confidential Case File. He looked puzzled at first, then frowned, and then scowled. How, he asked. could a murder be committed in two rooms, and without a weapon?
It was my turn to scowl, and then turn ashen. Obviously, in assembling the piles from which cards were put into the Confidential Case File, I had mixed one of the room cards in with the weapon cards, and that card had been selected as the weapon card. I had not checked that the cards were first in their appropriate piles. Because the cards were kept confidential until the end of the game, nobody had an opportunity to check my mistake. The blame lay entirely on my shoulders. I had nowhere to run and hide in shame.
I had just caused my friend and my wife to spend an hour of their lives trying to make sense out of something that was inherently nonsense. It was an hour that they could have spent fighting global climate change or listening to old George Jones records. Of course, they were gracious about it, but I suspect my clueless conduct will come back to haunt me if I someday blithely assert that of course I turned off the stove before I left the house. It hasn’t done wonders for my self-confidence either.
And to the makers of Clue: I am sorry that I have failed to recruit a new devotee, have effectively ruled out any chance of a major Clue tournament being held at my house anytime soon, and may be responsible for a major sales slump in the coming months. Hopefully, you have done well enough with the game over the past 70 years that my transgression will not matter in the big scheme of things.
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