The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So the other night, I played a board game of a much different sort than I normally play. Jonathan convinced me to try some Harry Potter Clue, which his ladyfriend had gotten a copy of and wanted to play. Clue is always a decent sort of time, so I decided to not hide and be sociable and play, even though it seemed like the game wouldn’t last long. I mean, whoever was playing as Harry Potter would obviously win, because he can accuse anyone of any stupid thing and always be right, because he’s the main character. Still, gave it a try I did.

It’s not a very well-designed game.

The changes to the game are pretty clear. For one, all the player characters are not also suspects, even though no matter what happens, it’s probably Harry Potter’s fault anyway. That change is less of a big deal, though it does steal the “teleport someone away to accuse them” aspect of the normal game that you could use to dick people over. For two, all but one of the “murder” weapons can’t actually kill someone. No, these are all like… evil inconvenience weapons. There are no murderers at Hogwarts. Probably. Just people who like to be really annoying to people.
But those are mostly cosmetic changes. There are real ones. The board, for example, has these little wheels built into it that, as you rotate them, open and close doors and secret passages all over the board. This is probably the most welcome change to the game, as there’s nothing wrong with that at all and it does give it a big of “magical” feel, though it does make it so you rarely have to walk out into the hallways once you get in a room with a secret passage since, by the time your turn comes around again, the secret passage in your room now probably goes somewhere new on the board. Also, the players no longer hold all the cards that aren’t the solution. You apparently give everyone 3 and put the rest in Dumbledore’s office. If you walk in there, you can look at all of them. I don’t know what I think about that change. It doesn’t completely remove most of the strategies with suggestions, but it certainly hurts them. I guess, perhaps, they wanted to give people a good reason to get out of the secret passages and walk around? I dunno.
The real big change, though, is this deck of evil things, called Dark Mark deck or something. Each player starts with 80 House Points (Or HP! Get it! Ha! Hilarious…ish.) and when you roll the dice to move, you also roll a dice that either tells you to move one of the secret passage things or draw a Dark Mark or Help card. The Help cards just sit around and negate some of the Dark Mark cards. The Dark Mark cards randomly take HP from random people. Some are extremely specific (Only female characters in one specific room) and some just dick over everyone. The point is, this makes it possible to die and fall out of the game. If you lose all your HP, you’ve lost the game. However, the game then makes you just sit there to reveal your cards for the rest of the game. Sure, you can do this by making a horrible accusation too quickly in the original Clue, but at least then it’s your own damn fault. It’s horrible game design to make a game where, through no action of their own, a person can just fall out of the game completely and no longer get to play. Hell, even Arkham Horror lets you restart with a new investigator or just go to the Hospital when you die. This mechanic is completely bullshit, and I’m not just saying that because I got knocked out on the third turn and just had to sit there (I still had fun. I played TapDefense on my iPod) though that does make the feeling a bit stronger, I suppose? But it doesn’t seem like I just got incredibly unlucky. It seems like this would happen regularly enough to quickly sour the game and make you turn back to regular Clue.

I mean, I dunno, I guess I’m turning into kind of a board game connoisseur or something. I do take my board games seriously. But I mean, I have nothing against the classics like Clue or Monopoly. That doesn’t mean they can’t have issues, and Harry Potter Clue… well, you have issues. Sorry. Just the truth.