CLUEDON'T

Creating games with other designers has been an interesting experience, and the most interesting part of it so far has been trying to keep up with Chloe Mashiter's tremendous, no-brakes-downhill, feverish trumpet solo of a mind. They have multiple ideas per second, and most of those ideas are pretty good.

We sat in my garden - Chloe also lives in London - and got drunk, twice, and what resulted was a sort of bet that we made with ourselves: that it should be possible to make REVERSE CLUEDO. (Or Reverse Clue, for you American types.) A game in which you were all frantically competing to be arrested for the same murder. A game where you could run into the room and, devastatingly, reveal evidence that proves that your rival definitely didn't do the murder and in fact is an absolute saint.

Was it possible, though? Absolutely. It is the attached PDF. It took ages. It does not include the following extra rules that we had to cut for space, and are planning to put on the back page:

- Combat and weapon stats

- Trapped rooms

- A timing mechanic, to add tension

- An XP system

- A series of fantastical twists that change the mechanics of the game halfway through

- Psionics

Etc, etc. Joyous. It uses a regulation Cluedo board, which you can pick up for twenty bucks, but I am of the opinion that almost everyone has a Cluedo board somewhere that they can access. (I didn't; I had to buy one. But I guess I'm the exception.)

That's all for now. 

- G

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Here's Chloe with their take on proceedings:

I think it was somewhere in between wondering why Ker-Plunk wasn’t used as often as Jenga in tabletop roleplaying, remembering a narrative hack of Buckaroo I once made, and discussing attempts at large-scale immersive Monopoly that Grant and I settled upon the idea of taking a pre-existing board game and making a role-playing game out of it. So many of my ideas for games/shows/creative projects are borne out of half-serious, half-sarcastic proposals, so it’s nice to have made something here that feels like it fits that theme. (Whilst also honouring my love of ‘murder mysteries that feature families so posh their world adheres to its entirely distinct set of rules’.)  

We definitely didn’t make it easy for ourselves (Grant did mention earlyish in the design process that, of course, we could make a very straightforward and fun game about something silly that would be far easier to figure out, to which I basically went ‘but why would we do that?’). Being very much a ‘throw all the ideas at the wall, even the awful ones, and figure it out from there’ kind of maker, it was really good to try out the challenge of writing a one-page game - especially with someone who actually knew what they were doing in that area.