It was once a favourite pastime of mine but, as of lately, I have realised the complete inefficiency and farcicalness of something I once held very dear to me… the game of Cluedo. Now I hate having my childhood pleasures ruined for me just as much as the next person (I really feel for the children of the 70s and 80s who now feel betrayed by one Mr George Lucas, and for the kids unlucky enough to have bought those jelly aliens who have since found out that you can’t actually make them have babies if you rub their backs together and/or put them in a fridge…not sure who the hell invented that myth anyway, it’s a rather bizarre way of impregnating someone.), but I feel it is necessary that everyone realises just how ridiculous this box full of deception is.
Let’s start with the actual concept of the game. The players assume that Dr Black is dead and that it’s up to the six characters to discover who the murderer is by guessing a person, a weapon and a room. Let me stop you right there. Basically, these people have turned up to some sort of dinner party and, on finding their host dead, rather than calling the police, decide to throw out random speculations as to who’s murdered the unfortunate bastard that lies before them. They have taken it upon themselves to catch the murderer as if they’re the upper class versions of Dog the Bounty Hunter. Surely to take the law into your own hands you must be better qualified than the police? But no, instead our detectives are a camp professor, an army Colonel, a vicar, a decrepit maid and…well whatever the hell Mrs Peacock and Miss Scarlett do for a living.
Now let’s take the method of deducing who the killer is. Each person takes it in turns to state who/what/where and then asks ONE person if they have ruled out ONE of these suggestions. Firstly, it’s a bit selfish not including everyone else and secondly it’s rather inefficient. Why not pool all the answers together to discover the murderer? That way Mrs White can get back to fixing that lead pipe under the sink (Personally I think Dr Black got what was coming to him if he continued to drink his tap water whilst having lead pipes leading to his sinks, did he not know that lead is poisonous…stupid man). It is one of the most pointless methods of solving a mystery. In John Carpenters “The Thing”, Kurt Russell’s character lights each persons’ blood sample with a flame to find out which one of the Antarctic team members is the creature posing in humanoid form, whereas in Cluedo, the party guests whisper into each other’s ears, blindly hoping that they’ll eventually catch this master criminal. And all this is going on whilst the corpse of their host rots on the floor of one of 6 rooms (speaking of which, if he’s died in a certain room, surely that was the room he was murdered in. It doesn’t take Hercule Poirot to figure that out).
The list goes on. The itinerary of weapons is ridiculous. It’s as if someone just walked around the house and came up with a list of things which could possibly kill someone…although I don’t know who came up with the candlestick (probably that senile Mrs White). Have you ever tried killing anyone with a candle stick? And why just those people? Why not anyone else? Some anonymous killer could be halfway across the world (which is the Equator) by the time those six morons have stopped pointing the finger at each other. It’s after playing this game that I worry that the Plums and Mustards of the world have the potential to be in charge of our country (The day I see David Cameron in a purple suit and glasses, I’m emigrating halfway across the world…to the Equator). When I someday have children myself they won’t be mindlessly guessing about murderers or forcing sticky aliens to have crazy refrigerated sex. No, they’ll be engaging in proper pastimes...like Monopoly.
