Professor Plum in the Conservatory with the chip rack
Aside from when I finally gave in and bought an ear and nose trimmer, the time I realized I was getting old was when I played the board game Clue with my family and reacted negatively to the fact that there was a flip side to the board with an entirely different crime scene, the boardwalk. Travesty! And the cards and board had updated graphics! Where’s my old school game? Of course, I realized I was being stupid, but boy that my first reaction was to mentally flinch made me reevaluate my entire life path.
So imagine my horror when I read about the latest PokerStars promotion and saw that it was a take on Clue! Poker and Clue? An abomination! Actually, it’s cool, seems kind of fun (if I could play on PokerStars).
Play poker, roll the dice
In this “Mystery House” promo, PokerStars is giving away more than $1 million prizes. Once you opt-in to the promo via the Challenges window (just have everyone automatically opted-in, please?), you will be presented with a 28-square board with eight rooms, very much like you would see if you played Clue. Some rooms can be accessed by one door, some by two.
When you fill up your progress bar by playing real-money poker games, you will get to roll a four-sided die to advance your playing piece on the board. If you land on specific spaces, ones marked with a door, you can enter one of the eight rooms on the board.
Each room contains a key. Get three keys and you complete the challenge. If your rolls are unlucky and you don’t land on three door spaces, you can still complete the challenge if you make it all the way to space 28.
Cross your fingers and hope to get lucky
Upon entering a room, not only will you receive a key, but you will also open a Chest that contains a reward. Similar to the regular Chests, the value of the reward depends on your level at the time. Blue level Chests only contain a prize valued at $0.75. Up at the black level, the Chest contains a prize worth $80.
When you get the third and final key, your Chest reward will be better. For example, at the blue level, it will be $5 most of the time, with a 0.1 percent chance of being $100. At black, the reward is $350, but 0.1 percent of the time, it’s a whopping $15,000.
It appears that you can only run through the challenge once, so when you collect three keys or reach space 28, that’s it, it’s over. The Mystery House promo runs to November 1. And remember to open you Chests! I don’t play on PokerStars, so maybe this is obvious, but they don’t open automatically. If you don’t open them within seven days of when the promo ends, you lose them.
Ok, in review, this isn’t really much like Clue except for the game board. I freaked out for nothing.
