The Lead Pipe

I mentioned my love of board games in the Thanksgiving blog. One of my favorites has always been "Clue." Since I can remember, I was always Professor Plum.

Only at Target, just in time for the holidays, is the Vintage Games Collection. It appears they've remade the boards and pieces of 7 different classic games in their original styles and put them in big brown boxes suitable for sitting on your bookshelf.

However, having kept the original Clue that pre-dates me, I have to take issue with their reissue.

1. "Clue" should be in quotation marks and the cover should have the 60s magnifying glass over the fingerprint with the characters in the handle.

2. The cards appear to be correctly reproduced, but the solution sleeve is wrong, as are the detective notes pads.

2. From what I can ascertain from the back of the box, they have reissued the player pieces in wood, but they've recreated the weapons in plastic, not METAL.

Now, as this is a picture of my original set, you are probably wondering why I care. Note if you will the metal weapons (with exception of the plastic rope) laid around the center of the board. There are five. Now note that there are SIX weapons cards. What's missing?

The lead pipe.

Note, too, that I have two game boards. I also have two sets of cards, two solution sleeves, two sets of wooden character pieces, and FIVE more weapons. I bought that set in a garage sale for a quarter in hopes any bent cards could be traded out and a piece of the original box could help me repair mine. And this set ALSO had NO LEAD PIPE.

Here's a later set (these are not the original molds, nor is the metal the same) with all six weapons:

I have to believe most original sets of "Clue" may well be missing the lead pipe. I mean, look at it. It's the piece most likely to roll off the table or out of the box, to be mistaken for some broken screw, and tossed into the trash.

So when I saw the reissue of the game in Target, I seriously considered for a moment spending $19.99 just to get the lead pipe. That tiny little bent piece of metal. Ok, so the moment didn't last long, and of course then I realized the "vintage" weapons were plastic, so the temporary insanity didn't last terribly long.

Still, just putting this out there -- if any of you have a half crushed box that looks like my set above up in your attic and you're cleaning things out, just take a second to peek inside and see if there's a miniature lead pipe that looks like it's already been broken across someone's skull. It's my little grail. And we all need our little grails. :)