I come from a board game family. Some of my dearest childhood memories are of my grandparents clearing their Sunday dinner table, as my sister and I raided their spare room, where they stowed away all of their many board games from my Mum’s childhood. We’d come teetering back down the stairs with a stack of games we could barely see over the top of, and we’d set them on the end of the table. It was normally Sorry first. Snakes and Ladders if my sister and I were going to have to play alone for a bit before our family worked up the courage to face two over-enthusiastic primary-school-age kids fighting over who gets to be what colour pawn.

I imagine my parents preferred to save Cluedo for those Sundays when they were feeling especially patient. I probably wasn’t much good at it as a child, but I found so much joy in handing out the miniature people to each player, ticking each room off my playing card, and getting to roll two dice on every turn. We played on the original board game with the 1949 design (although my Mum might like me to preface that this does, in fact, predate her childhood by quite some margin).

You’ll understand, then, that I felt an irrational and, to be honest, probably unjustifiable sense of ownership over Cluedo. The nostalgia of the tiny pencils and ticklists, sitting round the dining room table, and fruitlessly scheming left me feeling slightly defensive about someone - God forbid - reimagining the game.

“The nostalgia left me feeling slightly defensive about someone - God forbid - reimagining the game.”

The play opens in a country manor house, not too far from London, on a fatefully stormy October evening in 1968. Miss Annabel Scarlett has arrived to renovate the property for trying-and-failing rock star Rick Black - much to the bemusement of his unfaithful, gold-digger wife Mrs Peacock. In the hopes of a band reunion, old friends Alex Plum and the Reverend Hal (not Al) Green rock up. Matters are only complicated by Rick’s power-hungry agent Colonel Mustard, long-time housekeeper and meddler Mrs White, and actor-come-Butler Wadsworth. Chaos brews just below the surface - and it’s a treat when it begins to unfold.

“Chaos brews just below the surface - and it’s a treat when it begins to unfold”

I was worried that this reimagining was going to be a careless use of the classic characters, but writers Laurence Marks and Laurence Gran have crafted a thoughtfully hilarious reinvigoration of the game. The Christie-esque plot is adorned with each classic weapon and each of the original rooms, but brought to life by a muddle of motives, mischief, and money-grabbing. Marks has described taking each of the characters’ names into account; our Reverend must be caring, Miss Scarlett must be beautiful, Mrs White must be homely, and Professor Plum must be wise. Alongside Gran, he has twisted these into a murder mystery I loved almost as much as the original game.

As the play unfolds, director Mark Bell’s influence becomes clearer and clearer. His direction of the West End’s 2015 hit The Play That Goes Wrong is obvious; this play fuses farce and pantomime masterfully, and the actors’ slapstick, comedic timing, and excessively dramatised tableau had the audience laughing and affectionately groaning in equal measure. Equally, his direction of A Comedy About a Bank Robbery seems to have impacted the staging and set, reimagining all of the play’s best features in a new light.

On the topic of slapstick - Movement director Anna Healey has touched this performance with the perfect dose of exaggeration that it needs. An array of carefully orchestrated deaths would prove her input, but reigning Strictly Come Dancing champion Ellie Leach’s brief foray into the argentine tango was the cherry on the cake, and the audience appreciated it greatly.

“You begin to drift into feeling as if you’re actually at the cinema”

Credit must also be given to the whole cast and directing team for the montage scenes where characters run up and down the manor’s corridors, bump into each other, and once even get chased by a bear. They offer one of those very infrequent moments where, from your seat in the stalls, you begin to drift into feeling as if you’re actually at the cinema. They are executed perfectly in their orchestrated carnage.

On top of being a board game family, we are also a pantomime family. I therefore greatly appreciated Jason Durr’s heavily accented, crazed portrayal of Colonel Mustard, and found perfection in Gabriel Paul’s smoothly two-faced Reverend Green.

Cluedo 2 is funny. It’s (mostly) family friendly. And it’s full of really good actors who are clearly having a great time, who are happy to invite us along for the ride.

Cluedo 2 is playing at the Cambridge Arts Theatre until Saturday 30 March.