I suppose that if Col. Mustard held a revolver to my head or if Miss Scarlett threatened me with a lead pipe in the conservatory, I’d figure out whodunit — but on the whole, games requiring a lot of detective work hurt my brain.
I grew up less than two miles from where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the brains behind Sherlock Holmes, lived in London during the 1890s ... but that’s where the similarities end.
Thankfully, my 12-year-old son, Lucca, has a far more nimble mind than his dad and rather fancied the idea of traipsing around downtown Chicago on a recent Friday evening in search of clues to the fictional mystery: Who killed Boddy Black, with what murder weapon and where within the walls of his Tudor mansion?
“Anyone here solve a mystery before?” asked a young man wearing a black bowtie and matching vest who introduced himself as Butler Barnaby Bunberry, aka actor Matt Keeley. “Anyone commit murder? Nothing quite like that to get you in the holiday spirit!”
“What do you think of his accent?” I whispered to Lucca.
“Kind of English —ish,” he said.
There is no board in this game. No dice either. It’s called “Clue: A Walking Mystery.” The participants, or “detectives,” are handed an “auction catalog” of the deceased’s mansion and, going from “room” to “room,” they are supposed to uncover the clues to his grisly death.
Sound simple? It ain’t. Particularly when you’ve a week’s worth of workaday clutter in your head and you’d really rather have a beer and put your feet up.
“The puzzles are challenging — they are not simple,” explained Kevin Hammonds, the game’s producer and a New Yorker whose regular gig is designing escape rooms. Best to go with a group so you can combine brain power, Hammonds says.
But Hammonds and his crew are so darn friendly and encouraging that I felt guilty at not being a little more game. Besides, Lucca was champing at the bit.
“I come from a place called really far away,” said Butler Bunberry, when I quizzed him about his accent.
And with that, we headed up an escalator in search of the first clue. Here’s the weird thing: There is no mansion — not even a house dressed up to look like one. You’re searching for clues in Block 37, a glistening, multi-story shopping mall. On this particular evening, it was swarming with teens doing what teens do: clutching each other, giggling, gawking — blissfully unaware of the crime that had been committed in their midst.
“My word, have some imagination!” said Lisa Marsh, a fellow gamer in from California, after I groused out loud about how the mall didn’t look anything like a British stately home.
“He does,” she said, pointing at my kid.
Finding the “rooms” was simple enough — mostly in stores within the mall, as well as a few housed in nearby shops. In each location, you find a piece of furniture: an armoire, a bookcase, a grandfather clock. Trying to decipher the clues inside twisted my brain in knots.
But what’s not to love about a bookshelf where, by tugging on certain books, a clue in the form of a word is spelled out? Or a wardrobe in which one of the coats — just one — has an oddly familiar (potentially incriminating) tear?
Or my favorite: a safe that self-destructs if you twitch the dial in the wrong direction. I’m kidding, but it’s not easy getting inside.
“Uh oh, it says the safe will lock you out after six attempts. I did it seven times!” said a panicked Lucca.
Twenty minutes later, we managed to open the safe and retrieve the clue — sort of.
“We have the clues, but it feels like we’re not going anywhere,” Lucca said at one point.
About two hours in, after going up and down and up the escalator, weaving through the Christmas shopping crowds, I wondered if we were ever going to finish.
The game is self-guided and the Clue team sticks around until 9 p.m. If you wish to stay later, you can enter your findings online and check to see if you’re right. The game has no time limit — so you can grab dinner or a drink (or three) along the way.
But that felt like cheating — and besides, the Chicago Sun-Times was paying me to play the game. Many years ago, I went on what was supposed to be a 24-hour stakeout for a story. After 22 hours, the photographer and I, figuring we weren’t going to see anything interesting, went home. My editor was furious: “You want us to lie to the readers and say you were on a 24-hour stakeout when you weren’t?!”
So Lucca and I stuck it out. We limped over the finish line, kinda sorta thinking we might know who done it, with what and where.
We were wrong.
Thankfully, we encountered Lizzie Bourne, another of the game’s butlers. She hails from Guildford, a town about an hour’s drive southwest of London.
When your spirits are flagging, she says all the right things.
“Oh smart cookie!” she told Lucca. “Tell me more about secret passages!”
Or: “You know a lot of things. Most people, I have to really drag this out of!”
Then: “They’re solving it, they’re solving it!”
I can’t tell you who whacked Boddy Black; if I did, I’d have to ... well, you know.
Lucca and I walked out into the night and headed for the parking garage and then home.
“I didn’t think it would be this exciting,” said Lucca, who is usually very hard to please. “I thought it would be kind of stupid.”
