When I was growing up, every other family seemed to have Cluedo, and it looked so fascinating and mysterious from a distance, I felt sure it would be my cup of tea. 

On the farm, Monopoly provided my opportunity to practise shopping for land while my strategic thinking was developed playing Chinese Checkers and all sorts of card games. 

My Scrabble was poor and I didn’t learn Chess, although my girls play.

We did have something called Jiggle which I’m sure I’d be better at now than back then. 

Snakes and Ladders absolutely never got old and even the very young could play, while Yahtzee had five fabulous dices to add up.

But it was my very own board game of Mad that had a hold on my heart back in the early eighties. 

To win Mad, you had to be the first person to lose all of your money, and that just appealed to my sense of championing the underdog.

With dice to throw, tokens to move, cards to pick up and crazy acts to perform to make progress; think cackling like a hen or acting like a rock, it was such good fun. 

On top of all the colourful silly board spaces, players often had to change money with an opponent, so there was no point getting attached to the cash. 

I’ve still got the whole game, held together entirely by sticky tape.

My girls love to play Mad too, which is very special. 

In 2018, as soon as my three daughters and I took the plastic wrap off the brand new box of Cluedo, we were hooked. 

In no time at all we settled into using our favourite character tokens and playing late into the night, when we were way too tired to be on our best behaviour or concentrate on collecting clues. 

As solving the who, what and where of a murder is the aim of the game, you make accusations along the way to reveal clues to the crime. 

Anyway, I must dash, as I hear the girls opening the box…

Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with the candlestick if you please!