Ope Pardon, No. 35: The Magician, in the Library, with the Audacity

A horrifyingly long time ago, my college besties and I spent spring break in Vermont at my friend’s parents’ home. Three of us drove early, with the other two planning to join us later the same day.

For reasons I could not even pretend to remember, we thought it would be a good idea to play Clue after dinner the first night while we waited for the rest of our friends to arrive. Also, to drink — because it was spring break, after all.

Clue is a magnificent game. Simple, elegant with just enough quote-unquote strategy to call for your attention and more than two brain cells, but straightforward enough that beginners are at no real disadvantage.

Also, maybe it’s just the enduring allure of gothic architecture, but there’s also something that, for me, has always been very glamorous about Clue. We had a (relatively) old version of the board game, and I loved the illustrations — imagining each of the rooms in 3D, the secret passageways.

Anyways: On this snowy, let’s pretend stormy, night more than a decade ago, the three of us started playing, while we waited, and kept playing as the hours ticked by. (And kept drinking — but knowing the three of us, I do think what happened would have happened regardless.)

I said before that Clue takes quote-unquote strategy — to the extent that there is a small degree of strategy in the questions you ask, how you interpret your cards, in how you conduct your investigation. But there is not strategy in — or rather, there is no real skill in — being able to read the other players or divine things from the position of each piece on the board.

That night, we reached a point of such tunnel vision in Clue that we were making accusations after asking one question — racing each other to the stairwell if another person moved their marker even one square vaguely in the direction of the folder. When our friends arrived and we invited (forced) them to play a round, it did not resemble anything like a normal Clue round.

I love Clue. I am not even sure I have played it since that night, certainly not as memorably, but it remains one of my favorite games. Clue rocks.

I don’t know why The Traitors has hit now, nor have I spent any time trying to know why, a year and two seasons after it premiered, it’s suddenly everywhere on my social media feeds. (As I have said before, this is no longer my job and I have thus thrown any sense of journalistic due diligence out the window.) I shan’t be overthinking the popularity of a reality TV competition (though I have before and surely will again).

My personal journey began with some tweets here and there — enough to clock the participation of Alan Cumming and various Bravo stars and not much else — and then I saw an Instagram story from my favorite writer/poet/object of para-social attachment describing his unexpected fandom and I said, clear my schedule.

The Traitors, to be clear, is not based on Clue — though perhaps it should be. It is based, roughly, on the game Mafia. I am most familiar with Mafia as a camp game, as that is the only place I have ever played it, and the gist, in its simplest form, is this: You sit in a circle, everyone closes their eyes. At least one person is tapped as mafia. The mafia is then asked to point at someone to kill. When everyone opens their eyes, and the murder revealed. The group are then tasked with rooting out the mafia before the mafia kills everyone. It’s a bit like a dark and twisty Heads Up, Seven Up.

The Traitors was, originally, a Dutch show. (The Dutch are quietly some of the most prolific reality TV creators — they also developed the original The Voice, Big Brother, Deal or No Deal and Fear Factor.) On Peacock, you will see the US, UK and Australian version. There is allegedly also a French version — in fact, if you check Wikipedia, there are a lot of versions.

(A sidebar about both the game Mafia and France. In the versions of Mafia I played at camp in the US, there were actually more roles than simply mafia and potential victim or Traitors and Faithful, as they are named in The Traitors. In game play, we usually had doctors (or someone who gets to choose to save someone each night) and occasionally officially designated detectives. Now, one summer in France, my friends and I had rented an Airbnb in the Loire Valley that was loaded with board and card games, including Les Loups-garous de Thiercelieux — which means the Werewolves of Thiercelieux and, it turns out, is an extraordinarily elaborate version of Mafia that has seemingly 15,000 different roles, including but not limited to Simple Villager, Clairvoyant, Sorcerer, Little Girl, Hunter, Cupid (??), Necromancer, Mentalist, Pyromancer, Heir and Dictator as well as several different tiers of werewolf.

Not only do I think The Traitors would be better with at least the addition of a doctor or some saving grace, but I simply cannot imagine how French people watch the French version of the show without thinking it is terribly simple given that Loup-garou appears to be a cultural institution in a way that Mafia absolutely is not in the US.)

In any case, I do not consider myself a reality TV show junkie. I love Survivor (and Are You the One), but do not watch it religiously and I have never watched The Challenge, Amazing Race or Fear Factor. I have dabbled in Bravo, but not in any meaningful fashion.

And yet!