Tokens and weapons. Of the six original tokens, made of wood and shaped like pawns, five remain: the red token (Miss Scarlet), the yellow token (Colonel Mustard), the green token (Mr. Green), the white token (Mrs. White), and the blue token (Mrs. Peacock). The purple token (Professor Plum) has been lost for years and has been replaced by the top half of a black wooden chess knight. There are six weapons: the Rope, the Knife, the Candlestick, the Revolver, the Wrench, and the Lead Pipe. The Rope is a small piece of white rope, formed into two coils, one on top of the other, and knotted at the ends; the five remaining weapons are made of metal. The Lead Pipe is soft and can be bent back and forth. Unlike the tokens, which are essential to the conduct of the game, the weapons are merely decorative; their movement from room to room serves no purpose, except perhaps an atmospheric one, and in no way affects the strategy of the game
The porch. One wall of the porch is shared with the kitchen, one wall is shared with the garage, and two walls contain screened windows: four in the longer wall that faces the garage, and three in the shorter wall that faces the kitchen. All seven windows are partially covered by the narrow wooden slats of roll-up blinds (dark green), held in place by ropes that pass around pulleys at the corners of the upper windowframe and around hooks under the windowsills. The rolled-up portion of the long blind lies in a slightly slanting line across the four windows. Marian sits with her back to the long blind. To her left is Jacob, with his back to the wall of three windows. Behind him, in the wall angle formed by the windows and the garage, is an aluminum chaise longue with a flower-pattern cushion on which lie a small black AM-FM radio with extended antenna, a section of the New York Times folded in half twice so as to display the crossword puzzle, and an open Clue box with partitions for the cards, the tokens, the weapons, the die, the black envelope, the Detective Notes, and the instructions. The Clue box lies aslant on its upside-down green boxcover, whose split corners have been fastened with package tape. On the wall above the chaise longue hang the red-shaded lamp and a Navajo sand painting from Albuquerque, New Mexico, showing three identical stick-figure Indian girls with outstretched arms. Susan sits to Jacob’s left, with her back to the garage. She faces Marian and the slightly slanting line of the rolled-up portion of the blind. Beneath the rolled-up blind, through the four screens, she sees mostly darkness. In one corner she can also see a porch light and part of a front porch post across a street. To Susan’s left, facing Jacob, sits David, with his back to the kitchen door. The four-paned window of the kitchen door is partially covered on the inside by translucent yellow curtains. Two wooden steps, painted gray, lead up to the door. There are two more doors on the porch: the wooden maroon door, which opens to the garage, and to which is fastened a used Connecticut license plate with two white letters and four white numerals on a blue ground; and the aluminum porch door, which opens to the back yard and is located beside the four windows near the kitchen wall. The top panel of the aluminum door is glass, and is mostly covered with a dark red strip of cloth with black and gray geometric designs, hung there for the sake of privacy by Martha Ross, who received it from a friend traveling in India. The narrow lower panel is a screen; it is changed to glass in the fall. Whenever Marian, Jacob, or Susan rises from the table in order to go to the kitchen, or to the small bathroom past the kitchen near the entrance to the cellar, David moves his chair forward under the table. He wishes to leave plenty of room for the person coming around the table toward the two steps leading to the kitchen door, even though there is room enough. When David looks to the left he can see, reflected in the narrow band of glass beneath the dark red strip of cloth, the back of his chair and a piece of his light-blue shirt. When he looks to the right he can see, over Susan Newton’s shining hair, a green, red, and black lobster buoy from Maine, hanging by a rope from a hook in the wall.
David. David Ross, fifteen, puts down the black pencil and stares at his four cards: the STUDY, the CONSERVATORY, Miss Scarlet, and the Rope. As early as the fifth grade, when Jacob, home from Columbia, had sat down and taught him to play, David had begun to notice flaws in the game. Of the total of twenty-one cards (six suspect cards, six weapon cards, nine room cards), three were placed in the black envelope in the center of the board and eighteen were dealt to the players. When three people played, each person received six cards; but when four people played, two received five cards and two only four cards — a distinct disadvantage for the four-card players, each of whom had one less clue to the murder than the five-card players did. The unfairness had disturbed him; and although it was partly rectified by the fact that the deal passed from player to player, David had always secretly discounted games with four players. All that afternoon he had waited eagerly for Jacob, assuring his mother that things would be all right, calming Marian, who had arrived from Manhattan on the 10:48, and imagining elaborate, desperate explanations for Jacob’s lateness (the train from Boston had been delayed an hour; Jacob had gone out to change a five-dollar bill in order to call and had missed the train; he hadn’t called because he was afraid of missing the next train, which was due any minute but had also been delayed). When Jacob finally pulled into the driveway four minutes before dinner with an unknown girl in an unknown car, David’s relief at seeing Jacob, his sense that things would be all right now, was mixed with a sharp disappointment: there will be four players, the games won’t count.
Doors and passages. On the board there are seventeen doors, all exactly the same: yellow, with four gray panels. Like the furniture, they are pictured from above, in sharp perspective: they are inverted trapezoids, the top of each door being nearly twice the length of the bottom. The four corner rooms have a single door each; the DINING ROOM, the BILLIARD ROOM, and the LIBRARY, two doors each; the HALL, three doors; the BALLROOM, four. In addition to their single doors, each of the corner rooms has a SECRET PASSAGE, indicated by a black square containing a yellow arrow. When a token is in any of the four rooms containing a SECRET PASSAGE, it may, on its turn, advance immediately to the room diagonally opposite. The doors and passages are the secret life of the game, for they permit the tokens to enter and leave the nine rooms, and it is solely in the rooms, and not in the yellow squares or central rectangle, that play takes place, by means of continual guesses at the three cards concealed in the black envelope.