It was never Professor Plum in our house. The professor was entirely innocent. He was in the clear. Perfect alibi. He was doomed for eternity to be one of the good guys.
I don’t know when we lost the card for Professor Plum, but it changed the way we all thought about him. With no Plum card in the deck to start with, he simply couldn’t end up in the murder envelope. He couldn’t have done the crime! But we still had the counter, so Plum was still physically there in the house when it was time to investigate. This situation gave him a kind of purity. Everyone else was under suspicion, but Plum? Plum was always on the side of the angels.
When I bought my own Cluedo set a few years back, I immediately ditched the Professor Plum card it came with so that the experience would mirror my experience of playing the game as a kid. Five children in my house growing up, and all of us clumsy and careless. As a result, we played Scrabble with missing vowels, we played Monopoly with limited liquidity. We played a version of Cluedo in which it was never Professor Plum – in which it would never be Professor Plum.
I thought of Plum this Christmas. Not because Cluedo was on the cards, but because I was doing a spot of tidying up and I found a box in which, in amongst loose pens and bits of wool, the tin for Forbidden Island had upended itself. Forbidden Island is a really beautiful board game – a co-operative affair in which you hunt for various treasures on an island that’s steadily sinking. It’s clever and spiteful and filled with opportunities for your own behaviour to unsettle things for you. But what I love most about it is that tin it comes in – I simply love the chummy rattle of cherished things inside a tin – and I love the four treasures you’re after in the game, each of which are delivered as little chunks of plastic sculpture. Speak their names with me! The Earth Stone, the Crystal of Fire, the Statue of the Wind, and the Ocean Chalice.
Oh, the Chalice. Long story short, as I got the island back into the tin, I tracked down all the cards and counters and various bits of business, all of it except for one thing. The Ocean Chalice was missing. The Chalice! A lovely piece – a cool blue, a long stem, the whole thing perfectly proportioned. There’s a little resting spot for it in the tin, and it felt rather sad looking in there and seeing four treasures spaces, one of them empty. My count of enchanted objects was literally diminished by one.
As this was Christmas – and as every Christmas I end up doing something like this – I raced through the house for hours looking for that chalice. Inevitably, it was under a sofa. As soon as I found it, though, I sort of wished I hadn’t. The appeal of a game like Forbidden Island is ancient mystery, right? A wind through the chimes, a shudder disturbing matted veils of spider-webbing. The sense of dark absences down there in the murk. Maybe a box containing three of the four great treasures would be kind of perfect in its imperfection? Maybe there would be fun to be had from the Chalice’s storied absence, just as Cluedo was always more fun when there was a single definite goody doing the rounds of the stricken manor house. I feared for Plum, locked in that house with a murderer.