Quote of the Day: Clue

From Braden Lynch

I know this sounds insensitive, but all I can think about is the game Clue. You know, Mr. Green in the library with a candlestick…

The Clue angle never occurred to me when writing that post, but Braden’s comment brought memories from my childhood back to me. My parents were avid Clue players, and I remember watching them and their friends playing the game at dinner parties when I was too young to play along. I also would take apart the game and play with the pieces on my own. I don’t think I played the game much how it was intended as its a very simple game and other games like Battleship, Chess, Stratego and Monopoly were really more my youthful board game interests.

Still I found this website that has images of all the paces from my parent’s 1972 edition of the game I really enjoyed the photographs, and the details of the metal pieces.

Still in the game the murder weapon could be one of these six, A Candlestick, a Knife, a Lead Pipe, a Wrench, a Rope, and a Pepperbox Revolver (evidently all editions before the 1970s one it was a semi-auto pistol). Now the knife is depicted in that version as a Medieval dagger which was a purpose-built weapon, and the pepper-box follows the same concept as any modern gun, granted pepper-boxes were notoriously crappy, compared to the M1911 that was featured in the first American edition of the game. Still from there the other items were things that I had access to as a young child. We had candle-sticks on the dining room table, we had rope galore in various places, we had various wrenches in the tool room and garage including a monster pipe-wrench like the one in the picture, and of course we had plumbing, not much of the piping was lose, but that’s pretty easy stuff to find around.

All of it can be used to murder in the game, and the only thing I really didn’t have a clear grasp of was the rope. I had heard of people hanging themselves, but I wasn’t clear that a rope can be used as a Garrote to choke somebody. Still besides the guns and knives the other items were impact weapons. Besides the gun, while the dagger is a weapon, the kitchen at home was filled with knives…and well I have a thing for knives so I have quite a few of them all over creation.

Now picture playing a game of Clue with somebody from the Brady Campaign, or a Joyce Foundation group, or some anti-gun troll. Do you think they could actually play the game correctly if the Pepper-box was NOT the actual murder weapon?

Could they admit that Col Mustard (a member of the military who has underwent an extensive background check) could have committed murder in the Billiard Room with a simple decorative candlestick? Could the esteemed Professor Plumb in their imagination have brained Mr. Boddy in the Library with a household pipe wrench?

I mean that isn’t “Gun Death”, and neither of those weapons were designed to kill.

And I’ll close with an image sent to me by all-around great guy Miguel

Sorry Clue players, but unless the Revolver was drawn at the beginning of the game as the murder weapon, you really have no point to play the games, and all the party guests just should have ignored the corpse and went their separate ways.

No “Gun Death”, no Candle. Sorry!