Clue, made by Anthony E. Pratt
Target Audience: Anyone, recommended for ages 8+
Platform: Played digitally on Amazon Luna
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For this week’s Critical Play, I played Clue. My team selected this game because our concept Find the Farm includes an element of using cards and information gleaned through unsaid, implied interactions between other players to make inferences to advance further in the game. Additionally, our game includes an element of moving an avatar around a physical board on tiles to explore, which was additionally similar to Clue. This past weekend, I played Clue for the first time in perhaps a decade, In this Critical Play, I analyze Clue through these two aspects in how they differ from our game: 1) logical inference from other players, which is more based in note-taking card counting skills in Clue, and 2) moving physical character, which is a mechanic slowing the game in Clue.
Firstly, the mechanic of Clue that I ended up being the most unfamiliar with was the aspect of logical inference. Clue is based around a “card-counting” idea – where all cards are dealt out to players and, through questioning and answering the players progressively to your left, you can deduce what cards the person next to you has and what they don’t have. This mechanic requires active attention at all points of the game, and also a steady note-taking system (how many times did X ask about Y? Who ended up showing them a card?) that gets convoluted quickly, especially for first time players. I played perhaps 12 rounds of Clue, and only won once against the AI bots – largely, I feel, because I did not have a notetaking system, and quickly found it difficult to deduce who across the circle had what cards.
Caption: Example of Notetaking System
It is this exact mechanic that felt inaccessible to me in a way that differed from when I was a child – back then, I focused only on the cards I was directly shown and what I could glean from that, but inference was difficult with non-human players, as it was impossible to gain any information from their actions. Notably, the AIs had no difficulty with inference and notetaking, and seemed to jump to conclusions much quicker than me and my human partner (also playing for a few of the rounds). It is interesting that in a game centred around social deduction that the AIs would achieve so highly, indicating to me that the game is less social and more about fixed information gathering and processing. While this might make the game more accessible to younger folks since so much of the game is structured, it makes it not as engaging when trying to evaluate it through playing with CPUs. Perhaps this highlights how games like Clue are better played with people, and can’t truly be replicated as a single-player scenario. Find the Farm relies less on gleaning what specific cards people have, and more on reading responses and guessing based on the hider’s verbal words.
Caption: Example of board movement
Secondly, the structure of a moving physical character was something we also are implementing in our game. However, in Clue, there is a particular mechanic that slows down the gameplay. This was also something I was not used to from my childhood, though it has always been an essential part of the game. To “guess” a certain area in Clue, unlike the suspect and weapon cards, your avatar must be physically in that location, and move there through rolling a high enough number. This definitely slows down the game, as I needed to hope for high rolls to advance to a new location and gain more information.
However, it also led to an interesting dynamic where my partner and I were able to track where the AIs were primarily heading before they arrived and (at least attempting to) glean information from that. This aspect of the game adds a certain Challenge aspect to the game – as there’s a luck based feature that equalizes the game somewhat, and requires skill to overcome if unlucky. In Find the Farm, we do have a similar mechanic where the players must roll the dice to determine a direction to move in. Then, like Clue, when they are in a ‘correct’ location, they can guess for correctness. I believe this element does add another layer of social judgment as over time, a player’s particular movement style can be learned and information gleaned about their knowledge from that.
Citation: All images from https://luna.amazon.com/game/clue/B0F97WWW2Q
