Cluedo: Discover the Secrets
Cluedo: Discover the Secrets (Clue: Discover the Secrets in North America) is a 2008 board game designed by Hasbro to modernize the world-famous game "Cluedo". Though the game's main title is still simply "Cluedo" or "Clue", many retailers list the game with a "Reinvention" suffix, to distinguish it from the original game. The game was created to update what Hasbro considered to be an old-fashioned game, and became available in October 2008. However, the traditional version of the game remained on sale as well. , Hasbro no longer sells the game via its website . However, they do continue to sell a version of it as part of their "Grab & Go" travel series. Changes. Several modifications and updates have been made to the original game's equipment and rules. Suspects. The six suspects from the original crime have been updated to include first names and more modern-day lifestyles. Each character has a special ability or "power" that can be used once during a game. Weapons. The lead pipe and spanner/wrench have all been dropped from the original list of possible weapons used and replaced with the baseball bat and dumbbell. Likewise, the knife  and pistol officially replace the dagger and the revolver, respectively. In addition, an axe, trophy, and poison have been added, bringing the total number of murder weapons up to nine as follows: Rooms. The nine standard rooms on the board have been changed as indicated by an asterisk (with the original room name in parentheses). In addition to these changes, the center room, "Swimming Pool" (the "cellar" in the original game), is now a playable, accessible room in the game, to be entered by the player before making the final accusation. The starting spaces for Scarlet and Mustard have also  moved clockwise by 3 positions. Secret passages still connect the rooms of opposite corners of the gameboard. Rules. While the game generally follows the classic rules, there are several new additions to the game. A new deck of cards has been added to the game: the Intrigue cards. This deck consists of two types of cards: Keepers and Clocks. Keepers give the drawer special abilities, such as the ability to look at another player's cards; however, these cards do not override the original rules. Of the eight Clocks, the first seven that are drawn do nothing. The player who  draws the eighth Clock is "killed" by the murderer, and is out of the game. Intrigue cards are linked to new "?" spaces on the board, which require one to be drawn when landed upon. The player must move to the indoor swimming pool in the center of the board to make an accusation. This adds some challenge versus the ability to make accusations from anywhere in the original game. Reception. Kate Summerscale considered the "Englishness and datedness" of the original game to be an intrinsic part of its appeal, and felt that the contemporary details would become soon dated. She  noted that elements of "Cluedo" had become cultural reference points, and found the original game to have "a nostalgic aura, blurrily reminiscent of creepy old houses and buried family secrets". Journalist Cole Moreton compared the release of "Discover the Secrets" to the New Coke debacle in 1985 and suggested it was only a matter of time before Hasbro would make the correction. In the meantime, he suggested that one should "borrow granny's. Far better to die in England than Blingland". Robert Colvile of "The Telegraph" questioned Hasbro's stated rationale: "that the game should reflect 21st-century society — but  do its makers really imagine that the faux-Edwardiana of the original, in which the vicar and the doctor and the local spinster gathered at the manor, was an accurate reflection of late-1940s society?" He suggests that the appeal of Cluedo games was "not that they reflect the real world, but that they take you away from it". Grab & Go. Though Hasbro no longer sells Discover the Secrets, a variation of the game still exists in their "Grab & Go" travel series. Notably, it plays identically to standard classic rules but visually continues to use the new Discover the Secrets room  layout, and 3 of the new weapons (poison, dumbbell, and pistol) as part of the standard 6, as well as retaining other design artwork. However, the Intrigue cards are no longer a part of the game.