Cluedo SFX First Look

Clue, like Monopoly, Scrabble, and Trivial Pursuit, is one of those board games we all grew up with. Yet somehow, at some point, all that business about professors clubbing people to death with candlesticks in the drawing room started to feel very out of date. So in 2003, Hasbro launched Clue FX (called Cluedo FX in the UK), a sequel aimed squarely at the video game generation, with a touch-sensitive board, new characters, new locations, new murder weapons (lawn gnomes, horseshoes, buckets...) and a humorous audio narration provided by Ash the Butler. Now the mobile conversion, iFone's Cluedo SFX, is looking to complete the modernization process.

The SFX story follows on from the original game in which Sir Hugh Black (or Dr. Black, as he was known in the original UK release) is found murdered at the base of his staircase at Tudor House. In this current game, Sir Hugh's nephew is holding a party at the mansion, attended by all the usual suspects (Miss Scarlett, Colonel Mustard, and so on), when the body of family lawyer Miles Meadow-Brook is discovered. Now, in a new twist, it's up to four new characters--Lord Gray, Lady Lavender, Miss Peach, and Prince Azure--to unearth the culprit.

From here things progress as usual. Players wander from room to room, suggesting murder weapons, suspects, and locations based on cards handed out at the beginning of the game. If any of the other players hold the cards corresponding to your suggestions they have to show them to you, which lets you eliminate these objects from your inquiries. Three cards containing the real murderer, site, and weapon are hidden away. Through a process of elimination, you work out what these cards are and then race to make a final dramatic accusation.

Up to four players can take part in the mobile version. If there are fewer, the extra roles are controlled by the computer. Players take turns guiding their avatar around the nine locations, all of which emanate from a central garden hub. These are nicely drawn on the Nokia 6620 and are pretty atmospheric, bringing to mind the subtly detailed environments in those classic LucasArts point-and-click adventures--except here there's no daft visual humor. For example, the tennis court has a ball-serving machine firing away in the background, and leaves swirl around in front of the imposing mansion entrance. Most of the areas are static, though.

Between goes, the eight suspects do their own moving about, and before your turn Ash pops up to tell you where a selection of the weirdos have wandered off to, which obviously helps with your questioning procedure. To spice things up a little more, the characters often hide from you, so when you walk into an apparently empty location, there's a search option allowing you to hunt about for sly guests. But here's the rub--if you perform a search, you can't make a guess about the murder in the same turn. So with every turn, you must take a bit of a gamble: search or guess. This adds an extra element of strategy and interaction to the basic card-gathering gameplay and also cranks up the tension.

Another tension builder is the addition of a new character, the inspector. You can only make your final accusation while in the same room as this shadowy figure, so when you're pretty sure you know the culprit, weapon, and locale, you need to wait until the cop turns up in the right place so you can blurt out your accusation. This subtle addition is actually pretty important, since placing the rooms around a hub and making them all instantly accessible at the start of each turn negates one of the key elements of the original game--having to travel around the board to visit all the rooms. The randomness of the inspector's movements, then, mirrors the randomness of the old dice throw and simulates that vital element of chance. In this version, however, there's no human interaction within the rules of the game, which seems like a bit of a loss.

Indeed, Cluedo SFX, from the preview code we have, seems to be a pretty sedate experience, caught somewhere between the traditionalism of the original board game and the whiz-bang interactive movie fun of the update. It is strangely compelling though, with its essence of the original gameplay and those eccentric characters that bring to mind every Agatha Christie TV movie we've stumbled across on cable.

If you're stuck on a train with three other board game fanatics, the journey is just going to whiz by (there's also a quick play mode for shorter trips), but we hope iFone uses the time it has before its US release to liven the locations up a little more and maybe add a rule or two. iFone will change the name to Clue SFX for the US release in October, to avoid confusing American consumers. We'll have the full review of the game up shortly thereafter.