by Bruce Whitehill
published in Knucklebones games magazine May 2007
Mysteries have always been a popular pastime for Americans, from early detective fiction brought over from Great Britain to the mystery TV shows that became so popular in the early days of television and have continued to dominate the small screen until today. Mysteries have been extremely popular in all media, as serialized stories in early magazines or cartoon crusaders in comics; half-hour mystery dramas filled darkened rooms where silent listeners let their imagination lead them as they tuned in to the magic of radio; and murder mystery movies filled theater screens as fans filled movie houses from the late 1930s through the early 1950s. It is no surprise, then, that for more than a century mysteries have found their way into game boxes as well.
Mystery and detective games have been in the public eye since at least 1889 and have been popular since 1933; they reached their peak in 1936 and 1937, the time when the gangster movie was in its prime, and shot up again in 1954 when game companies began basing more games on television shows just as the mystery was establishing itself as a staple of that medium.
Early Mysteries
Not much is known about the origins of one of the earliest and most beautiful of mystery games, The Game of Detective. Published by Bliss in 1889, this rare game consisted of a heavy folding board, “the Robber Box” (lithographed paper pasted on wood), two heavy cardboard spinners attached to figural wood posts, eight cardboard detectives and assistant detectives, and more. The game was titled on the instructions, “The Detectives, Or, The Diamond Robbery”; it was not uncommon for games of the period to have a secondary title or to be called something different on the box from what was written in the instructions. The exceptional illustrations on the gameboard included over a dozen characters, such as the newsboy, a counterfeiter and the organ grinder, along with geometric designs and brilliant color. For the collectors among you hoping to locate the game (very difficult!), expect to pay over $2000.
Perhaps the first character to have found his way into a mystery game was Sherlock Holmes. Parker Brothers issued the Sherlock Holmes card game in 1904 with 56 cards, including four with a great Holmes illustration, and the cards that help make up a great mystery: “robber,” “thief,” “burglar,” “stop,” “clue,” “police,” and “help.” Parker advertised the game in 1904 in Everybody’s Magazine, and possibly in others as well.
Classic Mystery Games
America’s #1 classic mystery game has always been Clue. However, the game was not American—it was invented in England as Cluedo and licensed to Parker Brothers by the U.K. game giant Waddingtons in exchange for Monopoly and other games. For a while, there was an intriguing real mystery surrounding this wonderful mystery game. Around 1996, Waddingtons, looking to commemorate the impending sale of the 150 millionth game of Clue and Cluedo worldwide, issued an appeal to the public to find the game’s inventor. The man who conceived of the game in 1943/44 and brought it to Waddingtons in 1946, Anthony Pratt, was located—at least his grave was. Pratt had died peacefully in 1994 at the age of 90, unheralded for his great contribution. Pratt explained years earlier that he got the inspiration for Cluedo from the parlor game he and friends played at people’s homes between the first and second world wars. “We’d play a stupid game called Murder, where guests crept up on each other in corridors and the victim would shriek and fall on the floor.”
Clue variants abound, including Clue Master Detective (1988), with more suspects, more weapons, and more locations, and Clue—The Great Museum Caper (1991), a 3-D version where detective players compete against each other and against the player who is the thief. There is also a Clue card game and a video game.
Mr. Ree was the mystery game of choice before Clue, pre-dating Clue by eleven years. This 1937 Selchow & Righter game required players to determine which suspect held the weapon in his or her cardboard cylinder. Early versions, with an interesting gameboard illustrated by William Longyear, kept changing slightly, and had anywhere from 90 to 104 heavy stock cards (changes from playtesting in progress?). A later, less appealing edition marketed from 1957 until 1966 even eliminated one of the characters, “Miss Lee.”
Unique to the game were eight cardboard cylinders, and four tiny metal weapons—knife, hatchet, revolver, vial of poison—which could be concealed in the hollow cylinders. The scarce, deluxe versions of Mr. Ree had cylinders that were capped by plaster character heads, and in one rare set, each cylinder had resin with something trapped inside incorporated into the cylinder so they all had equal weight and, if lifted and shaken, rattled the same way as the cylinder with the secret weapon.
Mr. Ree, the name of the detective as well as the game, remained on the market almost two decades after Clue first appeared, but faded into the shadows of the competition.
Lie Detector became something of a classic soon after it was introduced by Mattel in 1960. The deductive reasoning game was unique in its use of pre-punched character cards that could be slid into a plastic lie detector machine; a probe stuck into the machine would cause it to ring if the statement made on the card was false, and process of elimination allowed players to determine the true culprit. Mattel also put out a game called Spy Detector, which was the same as Lie Detector but with different characters; it did not sell well and is rare to find today.
Lie Detector was revived and revised in 1988. This author, working for Mattel at the time, made a minor change to the score board for clarity, but the Mattel team made other, more significant graphic changes: all the smokers were eliminated, sporting pins instead of holding cigarettes; the “gangster” was promoted to “racketeer”; and—perhaps an unfortunate sign of the times—the “teacher” was replaced by a “psychic reader.” The game was sold to Pressman in 1989 after Mattel closed its games division; Pressman discontinued it in 1992. However, in 2006, Mattel issued Brian Yu’s Lie Detector: The Crime Solving Card Game, which employed some of the elements from the original game.
According to the Book
Many games are based on characters from a book series, so it is no surprise that mysteries would also transfer from pages to gameboards and cards. Besides the 1904 Sherlock Holmes game mentioned earlier, Sherlock Holmes has been the title (if not the subject) of at least three other games since then.
Carolyn Wells’ writings about the “G-Man” (Government man) gave Americans an insight into the honorable men in pursuit of the country’s gangsters. The Carolyn Wells G-Men card game cleaned up for Milton Bradley in 1936.
Games have featured such teenage sleuths as the Hardy Boys, by Franklin W. Dixon, and Nancy Drew, by Carolyn Keene. Dixon and Keene, however, were pseudonyms of Edward Stratemeyer, an author who, beginning around 1926/27, penned The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series as well as Tom Swift, The Bobsey Twins, The Rover Boys, the Horatio Alger series, and others. Eventually, Stratemeyer became a syndicate, farming out stories to family and friends, and eventually to unaccredited freelance writers (this author wrote “Casefile #17: The Number File”). The Hardy Boys Treasure Game came out in 1957 in two Parker Brothers versions: one with “Walt Disney” named in the title, and the other without. The Hardy Boys Secret of Thunder Mountain game was issued 21 years later, and featured the TV Hardys, Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy. The Nancy Drew Mystery Game was another 1957 entry from Parker Brothers, followed up some time later with the exact same game sporting a new box cover.
Another teen favorite was Cherry Ames, a mystery-solving young nurse. The 27 books by Helen Wells and Julie Tatham that came out between 1943 and 1968 served as fodder for Cherry Ames’ Nursing Game, a 1959 continuation of Parker’s teen mysteries.
Earl Derr Biggers (1884-1933) created Chinese detective Charlie Chan in 1925. He based his character on real life Chinese-Hawaiian police officer Chang Apana. Charlie Chan, the board game, was put out by Milton Bradley in 1937, and Charlie Chan, the card game, was issued by Whitman in 1939.
Cartoonist Chester Gould created Dick Tracy in 1931 for a newspaper comic strip and continued to write and draw the strip until 1977. His character was brought to the big screen and to television, and starred in a series of games, including Dick Tracy Detective Game, a 1933 board game by Einson-Freeman, and at least four card games, all by Whitman: Dick Tracy Detective Game and Dick Tracy Playing Card Game (both 1937), and Dick Tracy Card Game and Dick Tracy Super Mystery Card Game (both 1941).
Ellery Queen was a major figure in detective fiction, and was both the author and the detective hero in his stories, but in real life Ellery Queen was two people—the pseudonym for Queen creators and cousins from Brooklyn, New York: Daniel (David) Nathan, alias Frederic Dannay and Manford (Emanuel) Lepofsky, alias Manfred Bennington Lee. Their novels covered forty-two years and led to radio programs, movies, television shows and games. Ellery Queen’s Trapped was developed in 1955 by Bettye-B, a small company with a short run of high quality games in the 1950s. Trapped was unique in that the game consisted of a three-dimensional vacuum-formed board.
Ellery Queen, Sax Rohmer, Agatha Christie, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were four of the top writers in mystery detective fiction. So it appeared to be a licensing coup when Ideal Toy Corp. produced a series of four games, in 1967 and ‘68, from each of these highly acclaimed authors. The cover of each game was a collage of characters and scenes from the respective book.
Ellery Queen’s The Case of the Elusive Assassin, with its gameboard, figural pieces representing detectives in different poses, and 72 cards, was designed by noted American inventor Sid Sackson, and is unique in that it was transformed by Sackson into his popular card game, Sleuth, which is still played today.
An Agatha Christie crossover was And Then There Were None, based on the book of that title, originally published in 1939, and turned into a movie in 1945 and again in 1959 as Ten Little Indians. And Then There Were None was the final in Ideal’s “Famous Mystery Classic Series,” the only one dated 1968. The game cover shows an assailant shooting point blank at a well-dressed man, with statues of Indians on a table—one of them tipped over. The board is a plan of a house and grounds—and nine dead persons scattered throughout. The game came with four figural pieces and cards that had drawings of the nine suspects.
Fu Manchu’s Hidden Hoard, from Sax Rohmer (English author Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward, 1883-1959), is the most rare of the Ideal foursome. The “Hidden Hoard” title does not correspond to one of the Fu Manchu novels, however. The game features a dramatic cover showing Fu Manchu holding a pile of gold coins, a woman tied to a buzz saw, and an Oriental with an axe choking a Caucasian in front of a statue of Buddha.
The other game in the series was touted on the cover as “A Sherlock Homes Mystery Game” and after the title bore the inscription, “By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” Illustrations of Holmes and Watson were on the cover and the game’s buildup. The copyright was shown as 1967, by Estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and by Ideal Toy Corp. But the title of the game was Murder on the Orient Express, and the gameboard read, “A Sherlock Holmes Mystery Game with Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson in the Case of Murder on the Orient Express.” Hold on a minute—Murder on the Orient Express is a book by Agatha Christie! The gameboard showed a layout of a train car; affixed to it was a large dial designating the train’s trip from Paris to Istanbul. Ideal’s 1967 game came out long after Agatha Christie’s novel from 1934, but long before the movie’s release in 1974.
This anomaly, along with the lack of a “Hidden Hoard” reference to Sax Rohmer, makes one wonder if the Ideal Toy series was a licensing deal at all, or just an in-house mix of imagination. In any case, it’s definitely a mystery.
The Unusual
Besides the “Sherlock Holmes ‘Murder on the Orient Express’” mystery, there are other unusual mystery games. The Gracie Allen Murder Case is one of the more unusual ones on the market because it is based on one of the more unusual novels and films to have hit the marketplace. Respected mystery author S.S. Van Dine wrote The Gracie Allen Murder Case in 1938 because he wanted to incorporate his friend Gracie Allen into a Philo Vance murder mystery. (Gracie’s husband and comedic partner George Burns was the head perfume-smeller at the In-O-Scent Perfume Corporation in the novel, but was not in the movie version, and the book also included such characters as Gracie’s mother and brother.) The 1939 film based on the novel was not as well received as other Philo Vance mysteries, and, considering its scarcity, Milton Bradley’s The Gracie Allen Murder Case game was probably also not a very good seller.
In her typical style, Gracie joked about Van Dine’s writing of the novel: “S.S. Van Dine is silly to spend six months writing a novel when you can buy one for two dollars and ninety-eight cents.” We’re not sure what she had to say about the game.
Incidentally, Parker Brothers produced “S.S. Van Dine’s Great Detective Game” Philo Vance in 1937. Considerable components went into this special game—a sign that the Great Depression was at an end, for the game companies at least. The game had 100 clue cards, suspects and confirmation cards, and, in the deluxe set, two pewter pieces of detective Philo Vance.
Parker Brother’s Photo Crimes from 1937 was unique in employing actual photographs in which clues could be found to solve the cases. The set-up was similar to their 1936-37 Jury Box series of six games developed by noted criminologist Roy Post, in which the clues to the guilt or innocence of the defendants could be found in information written on the case cards. Parker Brothers’ Melvin Purvis’ G-Men board game, from 1936, was unusual only in the way it capitalized on the notoriety of the G-man who captured the FBI’s “Most Wanted” John Dillinger. Purvis was in constant contact with Parker, suggesting how they could promote the game and what store they should contact to sell it. In 1938, a total of 5,600 games were sold, which gave Purvis a royalty of $210.
Other unusual games include the original version of The Godfather Game (Family Games, 1971), which was packaged in a thin plastic violin case. Suspicion (1977) was a notable departure for TSR, a company that at the time was known primarily for role-playing games. Parker Brothers’ 1970 game, Caper, The Great Jewel Robbery Game, contained 60 miniature metal tools, including jackknives and scissors that had moving parts. The Brass Monkey Game, from 1973, is the first game to be produced by U.S. Games Systems under the company’s new name. 1313 Dead End Drive (Parker Brothers, 2002) is unusual in that this bluffing game is not based on a movie title like it sounds but does have over 500 websites referencing it!
Perhaps the greatest is how so many of these games could have been produced and played over the past more-than-a-century. The best of those from the last fifty years are still being played. (See Erik Arneson’s article in the March 2007 issue of Knucklebones on the “Top 10” mystery games.) Over time, we will try to unravel some of the mysteries about how these games came to be, and the inventors and companies behind them. In the meantime, there is a profusion of magnificent mystery games, old and new, to be played and enjoyed.
MYSTERY GAMES FROM TELEVISION—THE FIRST 30 YEARS
These are just some of the mystery games which were based on television shows.
In chronological order:
Justice - 1954 Lowell
Dragnet - 1955 Transogram 
Why (Alfred Hitchcock) – 1958 Milton Bradley
Perry Mason¹ - 1959 Transogram 
Peter Gunn - 1960 Lowell
Philip Marlowe, Detective ² - 1960 Transogram
77 Sunset Strip - 1960 Lowell
The Untouchables - 1961 Transogram
Surfside Six - 1961 Lowell
Dick Tracy The Master Detective Game – (cartoon series from 1961), 1961 Selchow & Righter
The Detectives - 1961 Transogram
Arrest And Trail - 1963 Transogram 
Burke’s Law - 1963 Transogram
Hawaiian Eye - 1963 Lowell 
Honey West - 1965 Ideal
Ironsides - 1967 Ideal
Hawaii Five-O - ³ – 1968 Remco
Mod Squad - 1968 Remco
Columbo - 4 - 1973 Milton Bradley
Kojak - 1975 Milton Bradley
Baretta - 1976 Milton Bradley
Charlie’s Angels - 1977 Milton Bradley
Starsky And Hutch – 1977 Milton Bradley
The Hardy Boys Mystery Game - 1978 Parker Brothers
Notes:
1) Perry Mason has the exact same board (and similar cover) as Dragnet.
2) Philip Marlowe, Detective is identical to The Detectives.
3) TV name was suggested by producer’s mother-in-law since Hawaii was America’s 50th state.
4) Columbo is the exact same game as Alfred Hitchcock’s Why.
