guardian_logoThe Guardian has another “history of” article on a board game, this time Cluedo.

In 1948, the year the first game of Cluedo was sold in Britain, the poet WH Auden outlined the requirements of detective fiction. His essay, The Guilty Vicarage: Notes On The Detective Story, By An Addict, argued that the sleuth should investigate a murder committed within a closed and closely related community, so that all the characters were suspects. Auden recommended the use of maps and timetables, and he favoured a prosperous setting. “The country is preferable to the town,” he wrote, “a well-to-do neighbourhood (but not too well-to-do or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet.”

(source)

Previous histories: playing cards, scrabble,