The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

One may have noticed that Mother’s Day was last Sunday. After we all had a nice brunch breakfast thing and the grandparents went home, we were left with a question: what should we do? I decided to step up to the plate. “Why not play that Clue game that Mom got awhile back?” A long time ago, after I had shown my Mom Scene It? and she had fun just using the DVD and answering the questions, she saw this copy of Clue the DVD Game in Goodwill or something. She thought “Hey, Scene It was fun, maybe this is fun!” Of course, it doesn’t work without the board like Scene It does, but I remembered it existed. I figured that invoking was a good move: I’m sure Mom forgot she had even got it, and that seems like a cool way to say “Hey, I remember and appreciate what you do.” Additionally, Shauna is a huge fan of Clue, so this was a new variant that she’d enjoy, maybe. So we set up the board, popped in the DVD, and played a family game of this Clue variant.

There were some good things about the game, as well as some bad things. For example, I think it was completely the right move to remove the spaces in between rooms from the board. In this game, you simply can move to any adjacent location. This makes so much more sense: the dice-rolling in original Clue just drags the game out. I also enjoyed having a fourth thing to solve, which was the time of day of the crime. You can still only invoke 3 different things when you’re making a suggestion, so it adds a bit more strategy to the game, as it becomes more complicated to figure out what you’re opponents have figured out due to the larger pool of things to think about. I also think that the DVD adds narrative to a game that could use it, at least for people playing like my mother. One of the new things you can do is “Summon the Butler” who will tell you background information about what was happening when the crime was going down. Adding the additional information through the DVD with particular scenarios does limit the number of times you can play, but also makes it feel more like a mystery, because you can figure out the answer through these other clues, not just with the cards. Finally, I really like how the game puts a clock on gameplay by causing you to have to “turn in” clues to the center of the board periodically. If you run out of clues, you lose, but by that time most of the clues are out in the open, so the game is about over anyway. This makes it superior to, say, Harry Potter Clue, which can just kill you at random for no reason, and leave you sitting there for the rest of the game.

Still, the DVD also adds plenty of annoyances. You have to make accusations on the DVD menu, which is cumbersome and annoying. In addition, messing up an accusation doesn’t end the game for you, which takes a whole lot of tension out of the game. I suppose that is more friendly, but it makes it so you’re much, much more rewarded for guessing earlier rather than later. You also have to constantly play silly minigames on the DVD and whatnot, which really just slows down the game. It doesn’t particularly add much. Special effects when going through secret passages just pointlessly screw up solid strategies of getting where you need to go to make suggestions. Slowly adding the item cards through, once again, summoning the butler is cool, but because of it, there’s little reason not to spend every turn summoning the butler until all the items are out of the Butler pile.

Final random note: the sculpts on the individual pieces are fantastic, which is kind of shocking to me. They have a lot of detail. Like DnD miniature level of detail, or more. They’re really quite impressive.

I think that, in many ways, this game is more friendly than standard Clue. Standard Clue is dated and uninteresting at this point, really. There are much better board games of that sort out there. This keeps the core of what makes the standard game interesting, streamlines in some places, and adds flash in others. That flash is often more annoying than not, but for people like my parents, that’s going to add additional investment in the game, so I think that, for a family play sort of situation, that’s a very good thing. Overall, I could actually see me playing this again with the parents, which is kind of surprising. With my friends who I can play complex board games with? No way. But this is a nice game to whip out when I need something to play with the family. It was certainly worth the, like, 3 bucks my mother paid for it.