The Clue! - Busted!

Written by MenhirMike

This session started with me having a closer look at my available tools. I really wanted to do the Jeweller the last time, but couldn’t find an accomplice that could open the safe. Would the game really give me a location and no way to burgle it? It’s possible, but it’s had a pretty good progression so far. So I went back and looked through every tool available and found that they sell a cutting torch that only requires a 35% skill in safes, whereas a stethoscope requires a whopping 70%. The stethoscope is faster, cheaper, and creates less noise, but the cutting torch is usable by accomplices I can actually recruit. 

Also makes great Crème brûlée.

I look like Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan in this.

The stethoscope costs 34 pounds, while the cutting torch is 180 pounds and also requires protective clothing for another 150 pounds. A stethoscope can open a safe in 8 or 9 minutes, the cutting torch requires between 10 minutes and 22:30 minutes, depending on the type of safe.

Open wide and say “loot”.

That leaves the issue with steel doors: Initially I thought to use a power drill (50 pounds, needs 23% skill in locks), which requires a power generator (340 pounds). But there’s a drilling winch for only 11 pounds that doesn’t require any power at all, and only needs 19% skill in locks. It can open a steel door in 1:15 minutes, whereas the drill takes 30 seconds.

Looks like quite the workout as well.

You know, I’m actually having fun with this. The game does present the information to me, I just had to find and actually look at it. You absolutely want to keep notes, because it’s a fun juggle now: How do I manage the money that I have, the accomplices I know, the tools that I need, while making sure that Matt’s cut of the take is as high as possible?

I decided to load a previous safe game before the previous heist of the old curiosity shop - I hope that’s okay with you all. I could have just continued and done the Jeweler without going back in time, but I felt that I wasted the last session on a simple heist. Like Captain Nemo, pride made me do this. I believe that this is where the game shines: Replayability. Optimizing everything. Trying to maximize every burglary for profit. There is a definitive progression of buildings in the game in terms of the required skills and tools, along with an increase in the value of loot.

To add a bit of spice, there is a certain element of randomness, like my car getting found by the police after the Karl Marx heist, or whether I can find certain accomplices. I am very sure that some accomplices only become available in later parts of the story (just like tools in the tools shop), but one still has to find them. When I did the first burglary, it would have been trivial to find Frank Maloya as a driver since he’s always right there on Holland Street, but does take 90% of the cut. Finding Justin White required me to go to a pub and be lucky enough that she was there. You can wait at a pub to see who turns up, but some of that requires advanced knowledge that an accomplice should be available.

Anyway, let’s get to the actual point. As said, I loaded my save game after the Karl Marx heist, but after I already bought the Morris Minor 1950 car. So I currently have 304 pounds and need:

• Electric Kit (35 pounds) + Battery (20 pounds) for Alarms = 55 pounds
• Cutting Torch (180 pounds) + Protective Clothing (150 pounds) for Safes = 330 pounds
• Drill Winch (11 pounds) for Steel Doors

Which comes to 396 pounds. No worries, I’ll just sell the radio. I said before that you can sell tools back at full price, but I was wrong: I only got an offer for 132 pounds, even though I paid 140 to buy it. But that’s fine for now, I buy the tools and am left with 40 pounds, time to plan the heist!

The setup for the Jeweller heist.

The Jeweller requires three members:

• Matt, who can handle the steel doors and alarms.
• Margrete Briggs, who can handle the safe.
• Justin White, who can drive the car.

Margrete is Herbert Briggs' wife, though they don’t live together and don’t see each other very often. They have a 12-year old son, Emanuel. I don’t know if there is any story significance to this, but her skills in safes and her relatively low asking price make her perfect for this.

The 2001 sequel to the game did not feature Emanuel since it was completely unrelated.

Justin is just simply the MVP behind the wheel. Which is a bit disappointing in how limiting it is: You always need a driver because Matt cannot drive. Early on, there seem to be only three options: Marc Smith, who wants 90% and rats us out. Frank Maloya, who wants 90%. And Justin White, who wants 47%. Justin just seems to be the only logical choice. And as you keep recruiting her for more jobs, her skills in cars increase while her asking price decreases - I wonder if there will be diminishing returns at some point, but she seems to be the optimal choice so far? Her main downside is that she has no other skills.

I drew up a map to annotate the heist:

A1 protects the steel door in front of A2. A2 protects everything else.

The steps are:

1. Matt walks up to the front door and uses the drilling winch to break into it, which takes 103 seconds (I choose Matt over Margrete even though her skill in locks is higher, because I want Matt to get better at locks, and am not worried about accumulating evidence)
2. At the 2:05 minute mark, all three members walk into the front door, and I close the door. I’m doing this because the building has a 39% “degree of guard” but no actual guards in the building - I suspect this means police patrols and the like, so I figure that an open front door would be bad. This heist will take quite a while.
3. Matt unlocks the steel door on the left with the drilling winch, walks up to the first alarm (Alarm System Z3), and starts disarming it at the 4:51 minute mark. This takes until the 6:36 minute mark.
4. While this is ongoing, Margrete breaks open the cash-box with the jemmy and takes 96 pounds worth of cash.
5. Matt walks back to the main room and uses the drilling winch on the now-disarmed steel door that protects the second alarm. We’re now already at the 9:06 minute mark, and Margrete and Justin essentially just stood around, apart from closing some doors and stealing the cash-box.
6. Finally, the second alarm is disabled at 11:32 minutes - time to get the real loot!
7. Matt and Justin take care of the loot that’s not in the safe: Two paintings worth 100 and 150 pounds, jewels worth 300 and 100 pounds, and the main attraction: a Cartier watch worth 1060 pounds.
8. Margrete is using the cutting torch on the high security safe - this takes a whopping 1407 seconds (23:27 minutes), so now we’re at the 35:32 mark. But, the safe is open!
9. The safe contains jewels (1090 pounds), money (600 pounds), gold (1100 pounds)
10. I decided to have Matt and Justin wait in the safe room while Margrete works on the safe, and all three walk out together to arrive at the car at 37:06.

A big step up from opening a wooden door with a jemmy in 15 seconds.

Skipping large amounts of time takes a bit. For example, when I switch from Margrete (at the 35:46 mark) to Justin (at the 11:32 mark), the game takes a few seconds to jump to the correct place in the plan.

This was by far the most involved plan yet: It required me to find the right accomplices, tools, and the total runtime is over half an hour. But there’s also not a whole lot to do: People just stand around for a long period of time, and there isn’t much to do in parallel. I realize that I could have gone in through the window instead of the front door, but that still wouldn’t have given Margrete and Justin anything to do until the alarm is disabled. Neither of them has the “looking out” skill, I wonder if that would affect anything for burglaries that run long. Of course, part of the long runtime is that Matt and Margrete took a long time for all of their tasks, which is another reason I want to improve their skills.

The watch could be a consolation prize for a player that can’t do the safe but still wants a lot of money from the loot.

Enough preamble, let’s start the burglary! The plan starts out pretty well, but at the 16 minute mark, Matt reports that a police patrol is driving by. I felt pretty good though because I had all the doors closed, didn’t break into the window, and decided to carry on - the game would allow me to Escape at any time in the heist, but I let it run. Everything looked good until about the 25 minute mark when Inspector Gludo announced that he had surrounded the house.

Good eyes, seeing it from inside a window-less room with the door closed.

I would’ve gotten away with it if it wasn’t for the meddling inspector!

The game tells me that “a regular patrol became suspicious”, but didn’t tell me exactly why. Could they see something through the window? I do not believe that I would have to complete the heist in the time between police patrols, so I wonder if this is bad luck or if I could have done anything better. In any case, this is a Game Over.

And this time, there’s no return with a stolen Abbot ring.

I decided to try again with a different plan:

1. Matt goes in by himself and disables both alarms, so we’re at 11:57
2. Margrete waits outside for 11 minutes and walks up to the safe, ready to crack it from 12:07 to 35:34, takes the loot (35:53 minutes)
3. Matt waits for 20 minutes in the safe room, then steals all the loot in the main room
4. Justin waits outside for 11:10 minutes, walks up to the safe, and waits there until the 35 minute mark, grabs the painting next to the first alarm and walks to the car

Here, I had to use the “Look at plan” feature because I was trying to optimize the time taken and always wanted to close doors behind me. But as I changed the actions of characters, I needed to be aware of who was opening which door so that I didn’t end up in a scenario where someone tried to walk through a closed door - which is exactly what happened, so I had to redo the last part in planning some more. I wish the game would allow me to fast forward faster, since all the interesting stuff is after the 12 minute mark and then after the 35 minute mark.

The radio could have been very useful here: Instead of me having to jot down timestamps exactly and trying to do mental math (“Justin is at 12:01 and Matt leaves the room at 31:57, so I need her to wait for 19:30 minutes, then open the door”), I could have radioed the accomplice.

I did make another discovery here: The actual time varies between planning and execution! Matt took a few seconds longer for his tasks than the plan said it would. This adds some variance and means that longer plans with more actions could really go out of sync at some point - which is a nice touch of realism, I guess? The character attributes like Intelligence or Mood talk about “avoiding mistakes”, so I assume that the worse a character's stats, the bigger the difference between plan and reality?

Unfortunately, I found a bug here: As I was redoing the end of the plan, I undid actions of characters, but one door didn’t seem to be properly tracked. Justin had opened the front door to get to the car. When I switched over to Matt, the front door was closed and I couldn’t walk through it - so I had him open it as well. When looking at the plan, the door was indeed opened by Justin and a few seconds later, Matt would also open it. I hope that this will cause any real issues and decide to try it again.

This was from the previous attempt.

This time, a police patrol was driving by at the 7:15 mark. So there’s some variance/randomness in this as well, and the exact times from the observation report don’t matter. But the heist continued as usual. When Matt tries to open the front door that Justin already opened, he remarks on it, but carries on as normal - so there is some fail safe here.

Thankfully the game just moved on as normal.

Speaking of a failed safe, Margrete complained about exhaustion after opening the safe. Somehow, everything worked out, and we all managed to escape as planned.

She still took the loot from the safe.

When something goes wrong, it’s “our” plan - I see how it is!

Wow, this took some effort and luck to pull off, but I actually did manage to do the Jeweller’s heist finally and with all the loot - 4596 pounds worth of it! One thing that I haven’t quite figured out is how time advances in the game. The save game started on May 2nd. After planning the heist, it was already May 21st. And now that the heist is executed (and Gludo arrested me for 24 hours as part of the story), it’s already June 29. I don’t know if there is a time limit to the game.

Time to fence the loot:

• Paintings valued at 250 pounds to Mrs. Parker for 230 pounds.
• Sold 696 pounds of cash to Mr. Maloya for 633 pounds.
• Gold worth 1100 pounds to Mr. Pooly for 944 pounds.
• Jewels worth 1490 pounds to Mr. Pooly for 1408 pounds.
• The Cartier watch to Mr. Pooly for 1001 pounds. (for comparison, Mrs. Parker offered 486 pounds and Mr. Maloya offered 394 pounds)

The watch alone is worth more than what I got out of the Old Curiosity Shop last time.

I retain ~56% of the 4216 pounds and finish the session with 2398 pounds in my pocket.

This was a really fun session. The Clue! is a strategy/puzzle game, and I did have to use my brain and keep notes here. There are a few interface frustrations, including the lengthy wait when skipping through the plan or the door bug. The information you need is available, but you absolutely want to keep your own notes and there’s a lot of menu diving through a speech bubble that only occupies a small part of the screen - I know this was partially done for technical reasons (they couldn’t easily put text information on the middle part of the screen that shows the scenery), but there’s a lot of scrolling.

The Jeweller is still a pretty simple building, the main complexity being two alarms and steel doors that require much more time and skill. But there are no guards and it’s only a one-story building, and most of my required action coordination was about waiting times. In the next session, my first purchase will definitely be the radio and then I’ll see which new accomplices and buildings have become available.

And this time we don’t need to spend a bunch of money on a new car.

Session Time: 3 hour 00 minutes
Total Time: 8 hours 30 minutes