Whodunnit?! (Cluedo Junior)

Member Name: Princess Leb

Product:	Cluedo Junior
Date:	19/12/05 (1515 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Educational but lots of fun for all ages.

Disadvantages: No pencils provided for filling in your detective notepad.

This is a children’s version of the classic ‘Cluedo’. Except this time there are no murders. Instead we have -

‘The case of the missing chocolate cake….’

Featuring the usual suspects:

Professor Plum
Mrs Peacock
Colonel Mustard
Mrs White
Miss Scarlett
Reverend Green

Let me set the scene. Something terrible as happened. Someone ate a piece of chocolate cake BEFORE dinner! OK, I confess it was me, but it was only a small slice – honest. Now back to the game!

I bought this game for my friend’s six year old daughter’s birthday. She has an absolute tonne of games but a lot of them are all in pretty pink boxes with a pretty lame theme and in my opinion I think every child should own a decent board game that they can look back on with fond memories (I also liked the look of it too!)


THE PACKAGING

The box itself has a dark green background which was fine by me but it did have me slightly worried that my present would get lost in a heap of pink fluffy things! And it did!

After all the fun of the girly things had momentarily passed, my Cluedo finally got the attention it had been longing for (and deserved!).

The box is beautifully illustrated with all of the above characters gathered around a table gazing at the scene of the crime - the cake! It’s a classic in the making.


CONTENTS

Gameboard
6 Character tokens
6 Furniture tokens
7 White plastic stands
7 Yellow plastic stands
1 Detective notepad
1 Die
Label sheet


The character tokens are cardboard cut outs of the above named erm, characters. This is a more interesting take on the adult version of this game where you just have coloured plastic thingy wotsits! Boooorrrring!

The furniture tokens are again, wonderfully illustrated cardboard cut outs which consist of a Pool Table, Desk, Chair, Piano, Planter and Dining Table.

The sticky round labels consist of the possible murder, whoops, sorry chocolate cake eating naughtiness times: 13:00, 14:00, 15:00, 16:00 and 17:00 hours.

Also, you have the possible drinks that said cake may have been washed down with: Apple juice, Chocolate Milk, Water, Cola, Lemonade. My personal choice would have been your communal garden Milk! Yum!

Then there’s the most important sticky label – the crumbs. This label is the one that denotes the culprit!


SETTING UP

Setting up is relatively straight forward. You basically apply the ‘crumb’ label and the five ‘time’ labels to the bottom of the white stands – one white stand will have no label.

You then apply the five ‘drink’ labels to the bottom of the yellow stand. Two yellow stands will have no labels.

You also have some stickers to apply to the die. One side is a yellow sticker. One side white and the rest are numbers between 2 and 4.

You then set aside the white stand without the label and the white stand with the ‘crumbs’. Mix up the remaining five white stands and without looking, remove one and place it in the centre of the board. This is the time that the cake was eaten! Now you place your characters onto the rest of the white stands and place them on to their corresponding spaces on the board.

It’s pretty much the same with the yellow stands – remove the two without labels. Remove one of the remaining and place it alongside the white one in the middle of the board. This gives you the drink that washed the cake down! Then you place your furniture tokens on the rest of the yellow stands and place them on the outside of the board next to the rooms that show that particular piece of furniture.



OBJECT OF THE GAME

Well, it’s pretty simple really, therefore this section of my review will be fairly short! You have to play detective and solve the mystery of who ate the cake, with which drink and at what time.


ACTUAL GAMEPLAY

One of my favourite rules of this game is the way the player who goes first is decided. It’s whoever last ate a piece of cake! It’s a good job the same sort of rule doesn’t apply to the adult version of Cluedo!

The board itself, again, is well illustrated with aerial views of various rooms in the house such as a kitchen, game room and dining room and trails of footprints weaving between the rooms for you to move the characters along.

On rolling the die you can move ANY character up to that many spaces along the connecting footprints on the board. Now, although this is a children’s game, me and my friend managed to get it wrong the first time we played it! We incorrectly assumed that you had to pick a character and stick with that same character throughout the game. However, you can move any character on your go as long as you don’t make that same character go back in the exact direction he/she came from. I think this makes it much better because it makes you (and any children that may also be playing!) think more as they have to decide which character to move for their benefit.

Some of the rooms in the house have a white circular space for you to land on and other rooms have a yellow space. The idea is to move a character on to one of these which gives you the chance to sneak a peek underneath either a white character token or a yellow furniture token. Whatever you discover underneath the token, whether it be a ‘time’ or a ‘drink’ or infact, the all important ‘crumbs’ label, you mark it off on your notepad remembering to mark off which room you’ve been in or which piece of furniture you’ve peeked under.

The other way to get the chance to look under one of the stands is if you roll the die and it shows either a yellow or white sticker instead of numbers.

When you are left with only one ‘time’, one ‘drink’ and you have found the character with the crumbs, you make your accusation! Then you “secretly” (as per the instructions!) look under the two stands in the middle of the gameboard and the stand under the character you’re accusing and the rest is simple – if you were right you win – yippee! If you were wrong you er, don’t win. You are out of the game and game play continues with the other players.


OVERVIEW

This game is simply fantastic. It allows children to actually use their brain and initiative but it’s not boring. Infact, I wish I owned it myself!

It’s a real family game which parents (and friends of the parents like me!) can enjoy time and time again. It makes a refreshing change to play a game that you know is making you (or the child) think about what they are doing.

Cluedo Junior is aimed at ages 5-8, but in my opinion it will last a lot longer that that. As I mentioned before, my friend’s daughter has a lot of games that she will most certainly outgrow, but this one is a definite keeper. It’s cheap, cheerful and keeps the old brain cells (old and young!) in a nicely working order!

You may find that with younger children you will initially need to help them with filling in their detective notepad, but after just two times of playing this, my little friend had it down to a tee!

The only downside – and a very small one at that – is that there are no pencils provided. It’s very annoying when you want to play and the only thing holding you up is the hunt for enough pens/pencils!

Any road, I would highly recommend buying this game for any young ‘uns with birthday’s coming up and obviously Christmas is almost upon us so there’s still enough time to nip down to Woolies and buy it. It’s definitely a worth while gift and although it may not look as exciting as some of the other games on the market, it’s one of the best I’ve come across and the value for money is superb because it will be most certainly be one that gets played time and time again.


PRICE

I bought this for £8.99 from www.toycentre.com however it is on offer at the moment for £8.00 – bargain.

It’s also available from Woolworths for £7.99 (even better!) and Amazon for £9.94 (not so good!).


OTHER INFORMATION

The game is produced by Hasbro – www.hasbro.co.uk

Hasbro UK Limited
Caswell Way
Newport
Gwent
NP9 0YH

Thanks for reading.

Sarah

Summary: A non dumbed down 'thinking' game for both children and adults alike!