Improvised Tricks: The One With the Clue Game

I was at a small socially-distanced Christmas gathering last night where I improvised a couple tricks and I figured I would write one up for you here. This is not something I normally do, because—by their nature—you wouldn’t expect improvised tricks to be as strong as ones that you’ve planned. (Or else, why ever plan anything?) But while I wouldn’t put the trick I’m going to share with you into the upper echelon of tricks I’ve performed, it went over very well, got a laugh, and people seemed to be more fooled and taken with it as the night went on.

My friend has a decent collection of board games, so that’s what I utilized when coming up with what I would perform for them.

I took down the game Clue and offered to show them something.

I had the group shuffle up the cards (with the characters, weapons, and rooms on them) while I wrote something down on a sheet from the pad used in the game. I then tore the sheet into three piece and put those pieces in the envelope from the game.

I collected the cards and shuffled them some more, then had someone cut the pack into three piles.

“The cards on top of the piles you cut will tell us who was the killer, what the weapon was, and in what room it happened.”

“So…” I turned over the top card of the first packet to reveal Miss Scarlett.

“The killer was Miss Scarlett…”

I turned over the next top card to reveal the Billiard Room.

“In the Billiard Room. With the…,” I turned over the last card to reveal Mr. Green.

This seemed like a mistake. With Clue you need a killer, a room, and a weapon. And while there’s no reason why three random cuts in a pack of Clue cards would get you one from each category, it just felt like that was what we were going to get because I was leading up to it so confidently. “It was Miss Scarlett, in the Billiard Room, with the ______.” You just expect a weapon to come up, not another character.

So I paused and pretended I was stumbling to make sense of what we had. “Okay, Miss Scarlett killed the victim in the Billiard Room with… uhm… with… well, I guess she beat him to death with Mr. Green’s fat fucking head. It’s kind of the perfect crime when you think about it.

“Now, before anything happened, I made a prediction. And I think even if I just got two out of three right, that would be pretty impressive.”

I removed my prediction from the envelope to reveal this…

Method

It’s pretty straightforward. I stole out the three force cards beforehand while I was looking through the cards and then palmed them back in after the shuffling. (You could also ring them back in under the “Detective Notes” pad.) Then I used John Bannon’s Directed Verdict to force the three cards. There you have it.

This type of thing—where it appears you’re going to do some sort of prediction, but then something goes wrong during the process, and then you show that you’ve predicted that thing that would go wrong—almost always gets a good reaction in a group situation. It’s not something I would typically do one-on-one, but I use it frequently when I’m performing for a larger group.

The nice thing about this format is that it adds an element of surprise to tricks that might not otherwise have one. If I just predicted the Clue cards you’d cut to, you might be fooled, but you wouldn’t be surprised by that, because you would likely put it together that that’s what was going to happen. But with this format, if you can pull off the idea that something went wrong, you get the “surprise” of them realizing that you actually predicted this “mistake.” And then, on top of that, you get the benefits of fooling them. So it’s two nice moments from the same effect.