Clue The Boardgame

Was it Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with the candlestick? Or perhaps Mrs. Peacock in the conservatory with the rope? Whatever the outcome may be, deductive skills and reasoning are at the heart of the classic board game Clue (or Cluedo, depending on what part of the world you happen to live in). Originally manufactured by Waddingtons in the United Kingdom in the late 1940s, Clue has become far more than just a clever murder mystery board game in the decades since.

The original game was developed by a musician, Anthony E. Pratt. During his time playing small concerts at hotels, Pratt gleaned the idea for a murder mystery board game from the trend at the time of including murder mystery games as part of the evening entertainment. The fact that detective and mystery fiction by the likes of authors such as Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie were also wildly popular at the time also fed into the desire to turn the genre into a board game. By 1943, Pratt and his wife Elva began designing the game; the original version was called “Murder!”

Pratt already had a strong connection to the board game industry at the time – his friend Geoffrey Bull, who had created the game Buccaneer. Bull introduced Pratt to the managing director at Waddington’s, and the company, after making some tweaks to the game and renaming it Cluedo (a combination of “clue” and “ludo,” the Latin word for “play”), signed on to manufacture it. But due to shortages of materials during the aftermath of World War II in Britain, the game didn’t actually get produced for the first time until 1949. Parker Brothers would license the game from Waddingtons and publish it as Clue in North America starting the same year.

Throughout the game’s history, Parker Brothers and Waddington’s both individually produced new editions of Clue/Cluedo between 1949 and 1992; both of these companies were bought out by Hasbro in the 1990s.

Like many other long-running board games, Clue has seen a number of spinoffs and other licensed editions over the years. These have included Super Cluedo Challenge (which added characters and weapons), Travel Clue (a simplified, miniature edition), Master Detective (also added characters as well as weapons and rooms), Clue Jr.: Case of the Missing Pet (a variant aimed at young children), and many more. In 1985 there was also a Clue VCR Mystery Game, which accordingly used a VCR tape containing scenes of suspects interacting with each other rather than a board, and players used cards containing clues to what’s happening on the screen.

Licensed editions of Clue have included versions based on numerous television shows, such as The Office, Family Guy, Supernatural, Big Bang Theory, 24, Seinfeld, Scooby-Doo, SpongeBob SquarePants and The Simpsons, and films such as Star Wars and Harry Potter. There have also been editions based on Disney theme park attractions, those being The Haunted Mansion and The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. There’s even been an edition based off another tabletop game – Dungeons and Dragons.

To learn more about Clue and game collecting, order a copy of The Overstreet Guide to Collecting Tabletop Games from gemstonepub.com.