Life-Size Clue (it’s easier than you think!)

Yesterday morning, we offered Life-Size Candyland for our younger patrons, definitely check out all the fun we had! And in the afternoon, we offered Life-Size Clue for our middle schoolers. The set-up isn’t too difficult, it just requires more than a little math. And some willingness to crawl around on the floor and lay down some tape. If you’ve got some tween volunteers, I’m sure they’d be more than happy to help out!

The first step is having a copy of the game to use as a reference point. This will make your life so much easier! You can use this to make sure you have all your rooms, weapons, characters, and more all figured out!

Board

As I said, the board wasn’t too difficult to put together – masking tape is your friend (and a little math).  And rather than create a huge grid, like in the actual board game, we just made paths that the kids could use to navigate the board and to enter each room. In other words, they had very limited choices in moving from room to room.  If I did it again and wanted to have a longer game, I’d definitely create the entire board, maybe for an adult program. If you lay out the entire grid pattern, you’ll also probably want to mark the doorways with maybe an “x” in the tape so players know how to enter each room.

Characters, Rooms, & Weapons

Because we have an amazing artist on staff during the summer, she was able to make us beautiful posters for each of the nine rooms in the Clue mansion. We used these to help the kids to navigate from room to room. I spent a bunch of time getting to color in all these amazing posters. And you know we kept them to use again! If you don’t have an amazing artist available to you, you could easily create a simple design on Canva. Then print out posters from regular-size paper to assign the rooms.

And other than that, we made a huge die out of a cardboard box. It was honestly a little clunky to roll. I think I might look for a blow-up die from maybe 5 Below or on Amazon. Honestly, you don’t even need something that big, you can easily just use a normal-size die, but the kids loved that it was oversize!

The last step was to make copies of the Clue cards for the kids and a checklist for gathering clues. These are easily replicable from the board game. I also found some props that we could use for the weapons. I had a little piece of rope, a wrench from my toolbox, I cut out a “revolve” from cardboard that looked very unrealistic!

And now, there is an entire LARGE Clue game that you can purchase from Amazon. And for under $15, it’s a great way to re-create what we did at a much easier scale and with a lot less effort!!!

Game Play

For the actual life-size Clue game, we broke our 14 kids into three groups. Remember you need more than two teams to make this game work! And we encouraged them to work together to roll the die, keep track of the cards, and make predictions.  And the best part? It worked out really well!  Some of the kids had never played the game before. And it was fun to watch them get the hang of it. While others knew the strategy behind it and it was great to see them work together.  Overall, the game lasted about 30-45 minutes (including instruction time) and it’s definitely something we’ll offer again!