My younger brother always came up with some clever ways to win at board games. (This is the nice way of saying he liked to cheat). When we were kids, one of our favorite games was the game of CLUE. He would get the cards he was dealt, look at them, memorize them, and then when it was his turn to ask about someone else’s cards, he would ask if anyone else had a card that he had in HIS possession. My brother was very clever individual; still is.
Obviously my brother used this move to throw off everyone playing the game. It always confused the other people in the game that were playing by the conventional rules. My brother also said that, technically, this move may not have been against the official rules, since he couldn’t find it in the rules printed on the inside cover of the game box. I don’t think anyone would ever think that someone would do that and never wrote a formal rule to forbid it. Certainly such a tactic wasn’t what the developers of the game had in mind when they invented the game back in 1949.
At first, this insidious move did manage to throw the other players off of their game. However, the minute we found out what he was doing what he was up to, we quickly told our mom. Our mom was like Homey the Clown, she didn’t play like that. She invoked her mom power and made a “mom rule” that forbid that tactic from being used by any player.
Despite the mom rule, I was so impressed by this move that later on when I was playing CLUE with some relatives, a devil jumped on my shoulder and was tempting me to use the trick on my cousins. I waited for the angel to pop up on the other shoulder to talk me out of it, but rather than an angel showing up on my other shoulder, another devil showed up instead! Can you believe it? Another devil showed up on my shoulder and joined his devilish brethren in their game of temptation. I tried it, but after my cousins fell for it, I couldn’t stop laughing and they discovered my malfeasance. You know, I bet my brother would pull this trick today on some unsuspecting victim.
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