Sometimes the best ideas come from combining two old ones. Pizza with pinapples. Electricity with glass bulbs. Magic with friendship. Minesweeper with Clue.
Cluesweeper is a free online game that combined the number-based tile system of Minesweeper with a randomly generated set of suspects and clues. Every round starts with a single tile already revealed: the corpse of the victim. From there, you progress through the level until you have enough evidence to lay an accusation.
There are three game modes. Story Mode places you in the middle of a corrupt city, unlocking levels and earning money as you work your way through various cases. Endless mode is just a series of puzzles, one after the other. Duel mode pits you against either the AI or another player, as you race to solve the same case. Honestly, I prefer endless mode; the other two are good for a quick casual game, but endless keeps my brain working.
The graphics of the game are very simple and stark, but that's perfect for a mind boggler like this. Each kind of tile is colorcoded, once it's revealed, and you can mouse over them to remind yourself of what they say. There are yellow clues that tell you about the suspects, blue clues that say what the murderer is NOT, and green clues that tell you what the murderer is. On top of that, there's white bonus tiles that can either give you money, time, or an alibi, an extra red tile for the murder weapon, and the dreaded Red Herring that eats away at your time.
The critical problem, in my opinion, is the suspect aspect limitation. Every suspect comes prepackaged with either being left handed or right handed, plus two other traits. That makes it easy to see if a particular suspect is the murderer; one trait wrong, and you're safe. This encourages a metagame that, quite frankly, can break the experience... but only if the player is lucky enough to get all three green tiles and a number of yellow ones.
In the end, Cluesweeper is a great casual mind boggler, whose sole flaw is that it isn't complex enough for my taste. Nevertheless, I have spent literal hours listening to its sad, lilting piano tun as I clicked tile after tile. I would definitely recommend it.
